Defeating the Jewish Alinskyites

Saul Alinsky, the godfather of subversive radical political action, had a very clear strategy for undermining and destroying his enemies: Infiltrate, divide and destroy.

Since his disciple Barack Obama was elected US president in 2008, Alinsky’s impact on Obama has received a fair amount of attention.

Less noticed has been the adoption of Alinsky’s methods by radical leftist Jews in the US and Israel for the purpose of undermining the American Jewish community on the one hand, and Israel’s nationalist camp on the other. This week we saw the impact of both campaigns.

The striking weakness of the American Jewish community was exposed on Tuesday with the Democratic primary defeat of Rep. Steve Rothman in New Jersey. In Israel we saw the impact of the campaign to undermine and destroy the nationalist camp with the defeat of the proposed legislation aimed at saving the doomed Givat Haulpana neighborhood in Bet El.

Ahead of the 2008 US presidential elections, the anti-Israel pressure group J Street made a sudden appearance. Claiming to be pro-Israel, the anti-Israel lobby set about neutralizing the power of the American Jewish community by undermining community solidarity. And it has succeeded brilliantly.

Rothman is Jewish and a strong supporter of Israel. His defeat at the polls in New Jersey by Rep. Bill Pascrell owed in large part to openly anti-Semitic activism by Pascrell’s Muslim supporters.

According to an investigative report of the primary campaign by the Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo, in February Pascrell’s Muslim supporters began castigating Rothman and his supporters as disloyal Americans beholden only to Israel.

Aref Assaf, president of the New Jersey-based American Arab Forum, published a column in the Newark Star Ledger titled, “Rothman is Israel’s Man in District 9.” He wrote, “As total and blind support becomes the only reason for choosing Rothman, voters who do not view the elections in this prism will need to take notice. Loyalty to a foreign flag is not loyalty to America’s [flag].”

These deeply bigoted allegations against Rothman and his supporters were not challenged by Pascrell. Pascrell also did not challenge Arabic-language campaign posters produced by his supporters enjoining the “Arab diaspora community” to elect Pascrell, “the friend of the Arabs.” The poster touted the race as “the most important election in the history of the [Arab American] community.”

Rather than challenge these anti-Semitic attacks, Pascrell enthusiastically courted the Muslim vote in his district.

Pascrell was a signatory to what became known as the “Gaza-54 letter.” Spearheaded by J Street, the 2010 letter, signed by 54 Democratic congressmen, called on Obama to put pressure on Israel to end its “collective punishment” of residents of Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Pascrell’s race was far from the only recent instance of anti-Semitism being employed by Democratic candidates to win their elections. In Connecticut’s 2006 Democratic Senate primary, anti-Semitic slurs and innuendos were prominent features of Ned Lamont’s successful race against Sen. Joseph Lieberman. Defeated in his party’s primary, Lieberman was forced to run as an Independent. He owed his reelection to Republican support.

LIEBERMAN’S GENERAL election victory over Lamont did not force all of his fellow Democrats to rethink their use of anti-Semitism as a campaign strategy. At a candidate’s debate in this year’s Connecticut Democratic Senate primary race, candidate Lee Whitnum attacked her opponent Rep. Chris Murphy as a “whore who sells his soul to AIPAC.”

Given the fact that the overwhelming majority of Jewish Americans are supporters of the Democratic Party, it should have been assumed that they would have responded to Whitnum’s anti- Semitic slurs by seeking to get her expelled from their party. They also could have been expected to pour resources into defeating candidates like Pascrell who actively court the votes of open Jew-haters. But this didn’t happen.

Instead, due to J Street’s agitation, and the penetration of the Jewish organizational world by J Street fellow travelers, for the past three years, the American Jewish community has been fighting among itself about what it means to be pro-Israel. At a time when the US Jewish community’s party of choice is increasingly falling under the influence of radical leftists and Muslims who reject Israel’s right to exist, rather than standing tall, Jewish communities around the US are being neutralized by the solipsism of self-defeating, J-Street-invented issues like whether AIPAC is legitimate and whether Jewish anti-Zionists can be considered pro-Israel.

Caroline Glick is the Director of the David Horowitz Freedom Center's Israel Security Project and the Senior Contributing Editor of The Jerusalem Post. For more information on Ms. Glick's work, visit carolineglick.com.

Anamah

Hard to understand how Jews can be so confused not to see who are their enemies and what are willing to achieve. Easier way is to find whose money is behind each group … and then that will be a piece of cake! If Soros network is there… run to the other way. Where that people is, won't be a good place to find anyone friend. There, is a place to find what the National Socialism failed to achieve… Destroy Jews and freedom all over the world. That's the Left. is not place to find friends…even if bribing Jewish groups, as J Street and other…Hopefully next year will be a new American President, a sincere, respectful, and constructive guy with conscience and responsibility. We all, need human authenticity and coherency to stop the resentment and divisiveness of this era. Hopefully will be some new level of moral and trust, when Alinskytes rules to infiltrate, divide and destroy will be despised as too much used, too "deja vu"…

Maxie

"Hopefully next year will be a new American President . . . '

Not if the rock-solid, near monolithic Jewish vote has anything to say about it.

cris

Although I agree with Ms. Glick that Bill Pascrell is a disgrace; to say Rothman is an ardent defender of Israel is quite a stretch. Before anything else, Rothman is a hardcore Leftist. In 2007, Rothman was on the front lines pushing for Obama's candidacy and since his election; Rothman has supported 100% of Obama's initiatives, policies and ideas – without exception. During his presidency, Obama has disparaged, debased and literally thrown Israel under the bus, too many times to list; yet thorough it all, not even of peep of objection has come from Mr. Rothman. To say Rothman is a strong supporter of Israel, has as much credence as saying you have friend who strongly supports Israel, but also contributes to Hamas.
As per the title of this article, if one understands political theory, it is categorically impossible to support Obama and Israel simultaneously. The problem is far more than Bill Pascrell. When voters are asked to pick between Hezbollah and Hamas, something is systemically wrong with the process. In this case, the vast majority of leftist Jews are so fantastically politically ignorant; that they incessantly support policies which are unequivocally antithetical to their own existence and proliferation.

Steve Chavez

Yes, there are FAKE JEWS who are the vocal minority and are the activists who organize the Boycott Israel, the BDS, flotillas, and who meet with their own kind in Israel. Ultimately, they HATE ISRAEL and side with terrorist actions and positions including propaganda on The Wall.

BUT, there are ALINSKY FAKES in every religion and in the 80's these MARXIST AND COMMUNISTS were directed by the Communist Party USA and their front, the U.S. Peace Council affiliated with the World Peace Council run by the KGB, TO RAISE FUNDS IN CHURCHES, and in the home of the Son of God, to aid an ideology, COMMUNISM, that says "There is no God!" In my own church, THE PRIEST WAS HELPING THEM. IT WAS CALLED LIBERATION THEOLOGY and where Rev. Wright got the idea from "his brothers and sisters in El Salvador" that was then BLACK LIBERATION THEOLOGY!

EVERY RELIGION HAS BEEN TAKEN OVER BY FAKES who shed crocodile tears asking for help and funds '"to help the people" and funds are then directed to aid in the banning the ideals of Christianity!

REAL JEWS MUST CONVINCE THEIR OWN TO STOP FUNDING DEMOCRATS SINCE THEY TOO HAVE BEEN INFILTRATED AND CAN'T BE TRUSTED!!!

Jim_C

So now there are real Jews and fake Jews, depending on whether or not they agree with Steve Chavez?

Did you know Alinsky hated communists?

Did you know that Mr. Horowitz and many of his crew here would be considered "Alinskyites" by definition?

Did you know Christianity and a free enterprise system are not one and the same?

Did you know I get a huge kick out of your unfailingly wackadoodle posts, anyway?

Caroline Glick's Jewish Nazism is breathtaking. These two statements take the swasticake:

1) "we saw the impact of the campaign to undermine and destroy the nationalist camp"

2) "the anti-Israel lobby set about neutralizing the power of the American Jewish community by undermining community solidarity."

Number one is a truly nazi statement. Number two is far more Stalinist. Ms. Glick, who has fled the United States to vilify it from abroad and cheer on fascism like Ezra Pound, claims that J Street is anti-Israel because Zionism cannot suffer a difference of opinion within itself. That is supremely totalitarian.

stern

once again, the troll proves that it has nothing to say with a post that says nothing – although to be fair, it does display the troll's blatant anti-Israel stupidity.

reader

"Ms. Glick, who has fled the United States to vilify it from abroad"

Aren't you a drama queen, fruit? Everybody here knows that you fled an institution, but it's no reason to panic.

Drakken

Nice to know you fully support and defend muslim jihadist of every stripe. How does it feel Quisling to know when the ballon goes up you will be running for cover?

Schlomotion

It feels like cheap prophecies uttered by a gamer.

Drakken

Care to make a wager on that Schlomo?

Schlomotion

Yes. If Islam takes over the United States, I'll mail you five Riyals.

Touchstone

"Caroline Glick's Jewish Nazism is breathtaking. These two statements take the swasticake"

Until Caroline Glick writes a manifesto in which she demonizes an entire people, agitates for their extermination, invades Poland and builds some death camps, calling her a Nazi is just a transparent attempt to offend and goad.

Earlier you claimed you felt pained by the Holocaust. That claim is belied by your glib conflation of Jews and Nazis, and even more so by your flippant pun. Likening Jews to their devilish exterminators (an absurd and intentionally offensive thing to do) and mocking the very symbol of unsurpassed evil are behaviors of a person who cares more about exacerbating old wounds and provoking a hostile response than conducting any kind of meaningful or fruitful conversation.

Nobody with any sensitivity for what the Holocaust means to Jews (or what Nazi symbols represent in the minds of most people) would mock the memory of it so callously. You can't reconcile "I'm anguished by the Holocaust" with "swasticake". You can't keep making such offensive comments and expect anyone to believe you're not simply trying to egg people on because of prejudice, resentment, or a penchant for troublemaking.

Schlomotion

Not every Nazi did what you said. That's not the litmus test for Simon Wiesenthal shoving a flaming hot poker up their rear end. They just had to be in the party, generally interested in it, somewhat famous.

"Nobody with any sensitivity for what the Holocaust means to Jews (or what Nazi symbols represent in the minds of most people) would mock the memory of it so callously." I don't think that's true at all. If we cannot mock memory we can never truly own memory, we just have to keep being sad, miserable, and accusatorily bitter about that memory. Forever polishing a tombstone. That doesn't seem like a good idea. I am sure Dave Berg thought lots of times about doing The Lighter Side of The Holocaust.

You would like to tell me what a person who believes one thing says and does. Do we ever really know what people do as a direct result of what they believe? The Holocaust is not just yours, you know. It is mine. It is a wound of humanity and an example of human cruelty beyond a certain pale. It is a milestone and a millstone around the neck of every non-Jew who has ever spoken to a Jew. It is a curse as such and it is also a curse cheaply used by Jews at every turn. I wager Jews abuse the memory of the Holocaust more often than non-Jews, especially by getting all puffed up and angry when a check written against it bounces.

Touchstone

"Not every Nazi did what you said."

Splitting hairs among devils. People who joined the Nazi party fervently believed in Hitler's policies. They were indoctrinated. They were genocidal bigots. They were little huns following their Attila. Is this a new strain of revisionist history — insisting there were some tortured Hamlets in the wolf pack? In any case, what matters is what people do, not what doubts they might have, and even the most inconsequential Nazis helped feed the beast that was the Third Reich.

"That's not the litmus test for Simon Wiesenthal shoving a flaming hot poker up their rear end. They just had to be in the party, generally interested in it, somewhat famous."

Wow. So Wiesenthal is some kind of villain for pursuing Nazi murderers? Are you serious? Is Wiesenthal the one who should have been hunted down in your opinion? A man who lost his relatives to these insatiable wolves is no villain for hunting them down. No wonder people excoriate you. The moral universe you inhabit is a profoundly perverted place. You claim to think the Holocaust was a tragic crime, yet you demonize one of the only people who devoted himself to punishing its perpetrators. Your perpetual insistence that you're not prejudiced against Jews is stale and disingenuous in light of the hideous comments you keep making.

Btw, they weren't "famous", they were infamous, and for good reason. And if only they DID receive the hot poker treatment. Far too many melted away into anonymity with the aid of sympathetic cretins. Perhaps you would praise those that abetted their escape (like members of the Vatican) and vilify their surviving victims who ached for a desperately deserved revenge.

I love the "generally interested" line. Is that how the world is to remember the Nazis? Were they just ordinary folks who simply made a weekend hobby out of exterminating millions and conquering their neighbors? No, they were all cogs in a monstrous machine. They knew what they signed up for. They had far more than a "general interest". They were believers. People have a "general interest" in things like astronomy and stamp-collecting. Not in bringing the rantings of Mein Kampf to fruition. That's not the bailiwick of dilettantes with a mere "general interest". Nice try.

Schlomotion

I know we live on the same planet inhabited by Henry Kissinger. On that planet, we also nakedly accept that humans will behave as subhumans because it is part of their realpolitikal repertoire, despite the fact that it is repugnant. Two contradictory things are true at once, as is often the case: 1) The Holocaust was a terrible thing and is alive and palpable in the minds and lives of the people who suffered it. 2) The Holocaust is a banal fact of past history which for all intents and purposes is now ancient history.

I know you are not given to simultaneously believe in contradictories. You accept the Aristotelian binary mind. I do not. It is simultaneously true that the Holocaust is important and unimportant, horrible and no big deal, unacceptable and yet passe. As for me, I have no biases. I could be a Jew who dies in a concentration camp, or a Nazi who begrudgingly shoots Jews, or an American who hangs Nazis, or a person who raises deer in the woods and never harms a living thing, or who lays waste to nations under fire and steel. I am a human. I regret, genuinely, that this conversation becomes more troublesome, because you are intelligent and good to talk to, but to me things like this are true:

The Nazis were wicked and moronic and stupid, but also heroic and justified, but simultaneously craven, but crafty, wrong, but superior, but deservingly crushed. It is tragic, yet humorous, just, yet insignificant. Simon Wiesenthal is simultaneously justified and also a pathetic vigilante, a hero, but a serial killer by Lawfare. Admirable, yet not good enough to emulate.

Touchstone

"As for me, I have no biases."

A grotesquely disingenuous claim easily belied by your relentless stream of monomaniacally anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, anti-Wiesenthal (etc) comments. Your ever-present antagonism is directed consistently at the same targets. It's only when pressed on the matter that you suddenly confess to supporting Israel and scorning the Palestinians in a specious and unconvincing attempt to demonstrate how complex and subtle your positions are. This is utter nonsense.

I can't be faulted for not perceiving contradictions where none exist. The unexpressed ones that may or may not exist in your own mind don't count because I'm not telepathic. If some 50% of your posts contained sentiments like "I also want to see the Palestinians driven out into Jordan" or "The Nazis were wicked and moronic and stupid", and if the emphasis in your posts wasn't ALWAYS on how wrong-headed and inferior Jews/Israelis are, only then would you be viewed as the bundle of contradictions you now conveniently claim to be, and it's unlikely you'd be considered a troll. But at present, the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of your posts don't so much as whisper anything but unfalteringly one-dimensional antagonism. So who are you kidding?

It's hypocritical of you to imply that I can't appreciate human complexity, such as the notion that some Nazis may have wrestled with doubt, while concurrently reducing your various Jewish targets (like Wiesenthal) to the level of caricature. You're implying that it's OK for you to portray people like Abe Foxman and Simon Wiesenthal as cartoonishly villainous (while betraying absolutely no contradictory opinion, because you weren't yet pressed to do so), but one would be gauche to summarize Nazis as evil. Right. I get it now. It's only your opponents, but never you, who must be reminded of their failure to appreciate nuance and complexity and subtlety and depth.

Obviously, you don't TRULY believe in the whimsical contradictions you list. You CLAIM to believe in them only when it suits you, like when you're trying to wriggle out of the "bigot" box which your own comments have placed you in. I know you think it's convenient to claim you hold all sorts of contradictory positions and, alas, we lesser minds can't appreciate your complexity … but that's not the case at all. You just don't want to accept the self-portrait you've painted. It's far less multi-dimensional and flattering than the one you've just dreamed up.

And I reject the implication that being a fully evolved "human" means one has to embrace the morally repugnant contradictions you list. One isn't a lesser human just because one doesn't share your yearnings to do terrible things. Perhaps you mistake your complexity for a strength when in fact, if it truly does exist to the extent you claim, it's a shortcoming and not something to brag about. What soldier would want to share a foxhole with a man who'd like to kill his comrade in arms as much as he'd like to kill the enemy? Disloyalty, mental instability, depravity, whatever the source of such attitudes might be: these aren't exactly feathers in your cap.

By the way, I would be much less hostile towards you if you did in fact balance your criticisms of the usual targets with the contrasting statements of support you've written here. Then I might just believe your claim to hold such contradictory opinions. But your claim will never be believed when you express such contradictions only when you're being pressured, and only when the conversation has drifted out of view of the other readers. My guess is you'll just keep flaming, without betraying any hint of the idiosyncratic complexity you claim to possess.

Schlomotion

I don't see why this is so hard to understand. Supporting Israel is a recessive opinion of mine, subsumed by other dominant opinions, and the weight of dominance is skewed by reaction to current events. I support Israel more when they are being less scummy internationally, less conniving, and less like psychotic thieves. I support them less when they make peace commitments and then figure they can embezzle and hedge bet against good will from the peace deal while paying it lip service until it collapses and then they can "retaliatorily" strike when they have finally disturbed and thwarted their neighbors enough that they throw a stone or utter a large curse too close to a cement wall.

So, yes, only when pressed on the matter, do I describe how I support Israel, because generally they disgust me politically. If they acted better, I would rave about them. If they were a nice country like Iceland, I would sing their praises. I don't fault you for perceiving contradictions. It's not a fault, it's a method by which you understand the world and process logic. I don't accuse you of finding contradictions and exculpate myself. I said before that a lot of what I say is perceived as contradictions. I'm not a German comic diffusing it. I am not a comedian. I am a musician. I am going at all of this musically.

I think it's funny that you say am trying to "wiggle out of the bigot box." There is no bigot box. There is a man saying there is a bigot box and that I am in it, but that signifying has no more stake than when I say "Israel is in the apartheid box." I suppose the only big difference is the theatrical anger that characterizes the Zionist reaction, whereas none of this discussion could remotely provoke me to anger. Saying "You are X. X goes into box Y, because X said the words Xw which betray the belief Xb" is not something I believe. All that goes into a box Z that says "A said Z and Z = string about X."

If you say to me that no string I utter can satisfactorily negate the string that you typed, then I simply believe that "A is beholden to thinking in terms of Z and his heuristic approach is to identify contradictions and demand their resolution in order to exchange packets."

In addition (or subtraction) to there being no bigot box, I am also inclined to believe there are no "morally repugnant contradictions." It would particularly be non-valid to say that there are morally repugnant contradictions about one's bias against Israel, as Israel is based in repugnant morality. Repugnant contradictions against repugnant morality negate one another.

You would be less angry if you simply chose to be less angry. One way to choose being less angry is to not get angry at contradictions and never use a moral repugnance response pathway, which is really a closed version of actual repugnance, for example if Repugnance were HTML, then Moral Repugnance would be MHTML, a subset of Repugnance in which repugnance and its fight or flight response were triggered more easily, as morality is more restrictive than reality.

Touchstone

"Supporting Israel is a recessive opinion of mine, subsumed by other dominant opinions" – It seems much less like a recessive opinion than a "get-out-of-jail-free" card, in which jail is the bigot box that people place you in every time they call you an antisemite, and they accuse you of this because most of your comments sound unambiguously prejudiced. If one opinion is so dominant and the other so recessive, the latter is in danger of being totally eclipsed by the former. At best, that's what's happening; at worst, you're simply lying about holding anything resembling a philosemitic or pro-Israel view.

Case in point: consider the rest of your first paragraph. That was so hideously anti-Israel, it strains credulity to believe that anyone who expresses such invective could possibly even entertain an opposing view (the opposite being an understanding that the Arab side has zero "good will" towards any "peace deal" and have been obsessed for a century with "thwarting their neighbors", the Jews).

It's not that I can't comprehend the idea of holding two contradictory views simultaneously. It's not difficult to do and I don't need any further lectures on the matter. The issue is that nobody would ever BELIEVE you truly hold anything but viciously anti-Israel views, considering your many, many antagonistic, insulting, offensive posts.

"If they were a nice country like Iceland, I would sing their praises." – I'm surprised you could make such a vapid comment. Iceland can afford to be "nice". Iceland isn't surrounded by hundreds of millions of enemies. Iceland isn't baited by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, by Erdogan in Turkey, by Hamas in Gaza, by Hezbollah in Lebanon, by the Mullahs in Iran, by Assad in Syria, or by the Wahhabists in Saudi Arabia. Iceland isn't pressured to do the bidding of the "Quartet". Iceland never had to deal with the PLO or the PA. Iceland never had to deal with suicide bombers or having its commercial airplanes shot at with missiles. Iceland doesn't have to worry about its athletes being gunned down at the Olympics. Icelanders aren't targeted the world over the way those Israelis and Jews were in France a few months ago, or in Mumbai a few years ago. Iceland isn't home to a religious group that's been demonized and persecuted and scapegoated and blamed for killing Christ for 2000 years. Iceland isn't ambushed every day at the UN. Iceland isn't the obsessive focus of the world's media. Iceland isn't the object of academic or economic boycotts. And on and on and on. The fact that you can make such an obtuse comment reveals an adolescent mentality which can't comprehend the basic difference in circumstances between nations. It also reveals a hardcore prejudice which brooks no compromise or contradiction, despite your protestations to the contrary.

"Israel is based in repugnant morality" – Re-establishing the homeland for the world's longest-persecuted group of people was a very moral thing to do. What Jews have had to endure is what's morally repugnant, as is your prejudice and your denial of same.

"You would be less angry if you simply chose to be less angry." – Sure, and if a lion was chasing me, I'd be less fearful if I simply chose to be less fearful. Similarly, if I stopped eating for two weeks, I'd be less hungry if I simply chose to be less hungry. Isn't denial wonderful? Just pretend there never was a cause, only an effect. How convenient to suggest that you've never said anything intentionally infuriating. You expect me to believe that it's those who respond to hundreds of blatantly inflammatory remarks who are at fault, not the author of the remarks. The same adolescent mind that thought Israel should be more like Iceland now refuses to take responsibility for making intentionally goading comments and earning the label of "troll".

Schlomotion

There's no jail. It's all imaginary, this stuff about bigot boxes and Monopoly jails that people go in for not being philosemitic. Whether or not there is a gradation scale for loving or hating Jews and a scale of social penalties for it is as arbitrary as saying you are a Jew or not. Really. I say I am a Jew, I am a Jew. I say I am not a Jew, I am not a Jew. There are hats to buy, crackers to eat, things I can do or not do on the weekend. I could be a vegan or not a vegan, eat gluten, not eat gluten, all of this stuff is psychosomatic.

I have been in an actual jail before with actual people telling me I am in a jail and really, I found it amusing. In fact, I was in an actual jail as part of this continuum that you people have created with your hyperinsecurity and paranoid fear of Muslims. Do you realize that you have made the United States nearly uninhabitable? Anyway, when I was in actual jail being told that I was there for actually committing crimes, and then was taken to court and the charges were dismissed because they were fake, really part of the same theater of protecting obnoxious Jews and wannabe Jews from the wicked omnipresent Muslim, I was still not convinced of my own actual presence in jail.

You see, I manufacture rooms made of cinderblock. I was placed in one also, and told that my name was "8" and that I was in jail for trespassing. However, Touchstone, my name is not, nor was it ever "8" and I cannot be placed in a room made of cinderblock with some balding, cuckolded caucasian telling me that I am attainted and have it be true. How much more could you possibly convince me? Touchstone, I was placed in jail by Nazis. You have not been placed in jail by Nazis, so your claim to being a Jew is not very serious to me. When I faced the Nazis, I told them they were Nazis, refused to show my papers, and refused to submit to an arbitrary checkpoint. I took seven hours in a jail which could have easily become 10 years because you warped Muslim-fearing pissants have made the United States into an Israel. You sir, goad me with all of your crooning about the oppression of the Jew. An American may not even board a train for work anymore without being harassed and manhandled by stupid Nazi-Stasi-like clerical buffoons and foot soldiers thanks to all of the moaning and wailing about the ubiquitous malevolent Muslim. I am not a troll, as you say. Trolls do not give their names or fight with their very freedom for what used to be banal and easygoing rights.

Your description of Iceland, though. I have visited the place, and still your description of it makes it sound positively amazing.

Also, anger is not like fear or hunger. Fear and hunger can save your life as they are signals to run or eat. Anger is not like those. When anger is not saving you in that brief moment when you throw aside reason and beat down an attacker, it is simply devouring your liver.

Touchstone

Once upon a (very recent) time, you called me "the only other intelligent person here". You asked me if I was a "college professor". You said I'm "good to talk to". But now I'm "you people" and a "pissant". I suppose this is yet another example of those wonderfully idiosyncratic contradictions (i.e. utter BS) you claim to believe. More on this later…

"…for not being philosemitic" – No, there's no pressure to express love for Jews or Israel. You're in the bigot box (as far as everyone here perceives) because you make bigoted comments. Simple as that. You could make constructive criticisms, or simply be neutral. You needn't be philosemitic. The bigot box is real to the extent that a man's reputation (or bigoted mindset) is real. Perception is reality. Perception creates the bigot box.

"you people" – You don't know who I am or where I'm posting from. How quickly (and self-servingly) you forget your own observations about imagined reality! You perceive me to be a member of the monolith of hated Jews that exists in your mind. (The Jews are real; the monolith is imagined). You reduce people to objects and place them in this mental box of yours and slap a label on them and denigrate them as "you people" or the like. How easily you can be goaded into revealing your bigoted mindset. How easily you yourself can be filed away in the "typical scapegoating antisemite" folder, given that you have the gall to connect the dots in such a way that you blame an unidentified internet commentator for JAILING you! I don't make laws; I don't enforce the laws; I don't influence public opinion; you don't know what I do when I'm not posting comments here. I could get upset and say "how dare you put that on me" but really, your crud is somewhere between laughable and tedious.

Touchstone

You can brag about your "extravagant" intellectual gifts until you choke. Don't make the mistake of believing that crap, though. You're just as frothingly fatuous as any pitchfork wielder who joins a mob in order to slaughter random innocents, using the pathetic excuse that he's been oppressed by those same innocent victims. You're just as typical and predictable and cliched and empty-headed and evil as any bigoted prick who practises GUILT BY ASSOCIATION and applies a BLATANT DOUBLE STANDARD, holding "The Jews" accountable for precisely the same misdeeds you allow yourself to commit. What a self-unaware, self-serving jackass you are.

It's precisely warped bigots like YOU who have made this planet uninhabitable for my own ethnic group, century after blood-soaked century. Tell me, do you find yourself feeling indignant when I lay all that guilt at your feet? Probably. And yet you have zero compunction about holding me and mine accountable for whatever indignities you've suffered, which presumably were entirely of your own authorship, given what a colossal mofo you must be in your day to day arrogant-buffoon existence.

I did absolutely NOTHING to you other than goad you with some comments. Or perhaps I'm not to blame even for that; maybe you simply CHOSE to be goaded, just like you claim others here have CHOSEN to be angered by your remarks. Goose and gander…

Touchstone

"obnoxious Jews " – But of course, nothing YOU'VE done could be construed as obnoxious. No, goading people with hundreds of inflammatory comments and insults isn't obnoxious. Describing yourself as extravagantly gifted isn't obnoxious. Claiming that your posts are works of art and this website is your gallery isn't even slightly obnoxious. Calling yourself "Schlomotion" isn't in the least bit obnoxious. No, only Jews are obnoxious. Right. Got it. No double standard here. Only astonishingly accurate self-awareness!

"I was placed in jail by Nazis" – Another ridiculous hyperbole. How you exaggerate your extremely lower-case "o" oppression. "Nazi" is the all-purpose word that whining crybabies like you use to demonize anyone you oppose. Were your jailers gassing and burning people? Were they exterminating a race? Did they drag you off a cattle car and make you search the corpses' teeth for gold fillings? Did they perform medical experiments on you, you pathetic lying wuss? You said you didn't like what you called "canned words" like "spew" and "vitriolic", but you have no qualms about using the ultimate in canned words when it suits your agenda: likening people you hate to "Nazis". Clearly, it's time to relocate you: I hereby place you in the bigot crib!

"You have not been placed in jail by Nazis" – Of course I haven't, and neither have you. But don't presume to know me or my background, you supercilious cartoon.

"…so your claim to being a Jew is not very serious to me" – Wow! A Jew isn't a Jew until he's been jailed by Nazis??? Are you kidding me? "Jew" isn't synonymous with "victim of oppression", even though you THINK that's what I keep implying. I point to the sad historical record ONLY when it's relevant to counter a point an opponent makes, such as your jaw-droppingly vapid assertion that Israel isn't a "nice country like Iceland". I suppose you think your brush with incarceration qualifies you for "Jewish status", which is absurd. With that twisted logic, you must believe you're more Jewish than most Jews alive today! The whole world is merely an object for you to transform into a monstrous abstraction so you can keep gratifying your hateful, disgruntled, self-loving, adolescent self.

"I have visited the place, and still your description of it makes it sound positively amazing." – Why am I not surprised that the point I was making about Iceland vs. Israel was utterly lost on you? The same thick empty head that whined about Israel not being "nice" like Iceland can't comprehend WHY the two places differ, even after it's been spelled out.

Schlomotion

See below.

Touchstone

"You sir, goad me with all of your crooning about the oppression of the Jew" – I thought you said one either CHOOSES to be goaded or not. Is this another one of those imaginary contradictions you claim to believe in? Again, reminding a pompous ignoramus about the HISTORICAL oppression of Jews is sometimes necessary, not to arouse sympathy but to make the ignoramus appreciate context. One can't discuss why Israel was established without pointing out the history that gave rise to it. One can't adequately discuss why a shallow idiot like you shouldn't whine about Israel not being Iceland's equal in the banal measure of niceness without mentioning the historical backdrop that places Israel in proper context.

As for exaggerating the threat from Muslims, two points. One, it's more serious than you're able or willing to recognize. Two, it DOES get exaggerated, I agree. Hey, look – a contradiction! The threat is both real but also, sometimes, exaggerated. But what is even more dangerous with respect to America is the salivating mob mentality people like you operate with. Jews in America, for instance, have more to fear from seething bigots like you (who lump all Jews together and wrongfully scapegoat them for making America "uninhabitable") than they do from Muslims. Threats to Jews in Israel are another matter.

"you warped Muslim-fearing pissants" – You're the one who's truly proven to be the "pissant" in this exchange. Your comments are so unbelievably ludicrous, gratuitously contrarian, time-wasting, shallow, hyperbolic, ignorant, arrogant, self-unaware, indefensible, inconsistent, contradictory, derivative, inconsequential, feeble-minded, presumptuous, baseless, feckless, hateful, offensive, obscene, and odious … you're worse than a pissant. You're a human BowelMotion. That's how I intend to refer to you from now on: BowelMotion, the tiresome pissant who defecates all over the site.

Schlomotion

I hope you feel better for getting all of that out of your system. I found myself wanting to agree with it just out of the esteem I have for your passion and writing style, but like even the most exciting 4th of July grand finale, it was just not the real Revolutionary War. Very good, consummate, excellent, but not the real thing. Not applicable.

In brief: I said many things, all of them deliberate, none of them by chance. I crafted many things to say to you, of the heart and mind. The ones I knew were important merited a post each of rebuttal from you. I value the time you took. What stands out to me:

A person can be good to talk to and supremely intelligent and also a pissant. If we hold people to Vonnegut's definition of pissant, there would be precious few people to talk to, even and especially amongst the erudite. Norman Mailer was an excellent writer and thinker. He was also a pissant. Dick Cavett proved him a pissant during the Gore Vidal feud.

I don't consider you to be a part of the oppressive Jewish monolith. There is, as you say, no such thing. There is an oppressive Jewish microlith. It bothers bigots with no sense of scale, but really and more importantly, it influences politicians with no sense of scale. That's how we have a world war against Islam. Even a small stone lodged in the kidney can make it uncomfortable to uri.nate. That is what Israel is to the world. It is a kidney stone set against world peace. Sonic treatment is what I am doing.

I do not believe you, but I do hope it is true that you blame me more for the "plight of the Jews" than you blame the Muslims. That gives me hope, for I intend to destroy all this nonsense about Muslims taking over the world and Israelis defending us from it, and surveillance and the TSA, and VIPR teams, and all this nonsense which is largely driven by Michael Chertoff. Not voice my opinion about it. Take it apart. I am heartened that people like yourself can take a moment and remind yourself that, no, Muslims are not such a big deal after all, that both Muslim and Jews now have people ready to eat their arms off to shut them up.

The part you said about goading is true. I have indeed indulged (and also goaded) you to poke your lameds at me, because I know you are trying to lead me to mem and then make me drink. I am, however, not the kind of aleph that drinks at the saltwater he has been led to. I am the aleph that knows what kind of nun moves beneath the surface. I am the kind of aleph that becomes that fish by knowing how it will move when we get there. The fish with vavs to catch the fishermen. I am not stubborn. I am not arrogant. I am most of all, not bigoted against you. I can turn lameds into zayins. Everything you say is an advantage to me. I like you. I don't think you like me. I do not hate. Not anyone. Grouping is not hating. Categorizing is not hating.

Your most compelling attempt was to state that Jews are not defined as oppressed. But then you hung onto the idea that they are. And then you tried to say that because someone had not experienced the worst thing, he has not experienced the thing. This is neither true of Nazi oppression, nor of fire, nor of sexual harassment. One need not experience the full degree of oppression to have faced it. One need not also be tortured in prison and mutilated in order to face down Nazism. One can always add a shade of worse and use it to excuse away a shade of not as bad. That, and nothing that I have ever done is what gives you rampant Nazism.

You may want to reverse that and show me that because I dismiss Muslim extremism I am opening the door to have it happen. But which is it? Are you right, or are you not right? Is dismissal a slippery slope to causation or are we simply both exaggerating?

Touchstone

"I hope you feel better for getting all of that out of your system."

No, it made me feel worse. I'd rather be Jekyll than Hyde, but your antics tend to catalyze the transformation.

"Very good, consummate, excellent"

No, my posts were full of harsh vulgarities that reminded me how easy it is to yank my chain. Believe it or not, I don't have much appetite for perpetual insult-trading.

"no sense of scale"

The likes of Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and many other places dominated by Muslim fanatics – some of them armed to the teeth and politically unstable – suggest that the scale is of sufficient magnitude to justify the world's preoccupation. The reason it does get exaggerated sometimes is precisely because it's fundamentally serious to begin with. The rest of us have ample reason to be nervous, so it's easy to overreact. Out of 1.5 billion Muslims, perhaps 10% are fanatics. Even if it's just 5%, that's 75 million fanatics. More than enough to focus the mind, especially when one considers that they're not localized to one place but scattered globally.

"That's how we have a world war against Islam."

No. It started fourteen hundred years ago, when Muhammad's legions launched holy war on the rest of the world. To this day, the Muslims who declare "Islam will rule" mean to back up those words with action. Modern-day Israel is a very, very recent player on this stage. It's just one of the latest exacerbations of West-East tensions. Take a longer view. Over the centuries, there have been many other pretexts for a resurgence of Islamic violence. Historically, Islam is triumphalist and imperialist, so it can't stand the affront to its submission-demanding authority that Israel represents. I've been called an "ungrateful insect" by a Muslim for the crime of being a Jew who dares to oppose the prospect of Islamic dominion over my affairs. I, like the rest of humanity, am expected to submit to their ultimate authority. It's only a religion when peaceful people practise it; it's a totalitarian political system in the minds of so many millions of aggressive adherents, and therefore a perpetual threat to the rest of humanity who DON'T want to live by its precepts.

"That is what Israel is to the world. It is a kidney stone set against world peace."

That boilerplate would go over well at the UN, where everyone blames Israel for everything and conveniently ignores the rest of the world's festering sores. If you remove Israel from the equation, you're still left with all those fanatics and the mainstream of the Ummah, most of whom dream of Islamic conquest. A relatively peaceful takeover is happening right before our eyes in Europe. That too gets exaggerated a bit, but as I said, it gets exaggerated because there's more than a grain of truth to it to begin with. When the Muslim percentage of the population reaches a critical point, as it has in a few pockets of Europe, society must adapt to suit their demands, which are the demands of the aforementioned totalitarian political system. This prospect does get exaggerated with respect to Muslims in America because the demographic picture is vastly different than that of Europe. But tell the Parisians who can't use certain streets because they've been monopolized by praying Muslims, or the Brits who steer clear of their infamous "no-go zones", or the Dutch who fear murderous reprisals in the street, or the terrified Jews of Malmo, or many other Europeans intimidated by the growing presence of Muslim totalitarians that the Muslim threat is exaggerated.

If you think of Israel as a kidney stone, think of Islam as a grapefruit-sized brain tumor.

Schlomotion

I think you make a lot of good points here. Some I disagree with, some I agree with. The agrees are: Yes indeed, Islam is a grapefruit-sized brain tumor, but largely it is carried, as is Christianity and Judaism by people other than myself, and the burden of such beliefs are largely upon themselves. Their Koshers and Harams and Halals and Sins are essentially not my language and not my intellectual or behavioral or legal leash, so mainly I feel like I can snap my fingers at all of that. Yes, I empathize and identify with someone who thinks that people who want to blow themselves up in my midst should be shot at a safe distance, but I am also not embroiled in the process of disaffecting or dispossessing anybody, so to me the direness is different.

It makes no matter to me if the no-go zone or the no music zone or the no dancing and fornicating zone was drawn by Muhammad, by The Lubavitcher Rebbe, or by Jesus or Mayor Bloomberg or the Police, I have equal disregard for any such stricture. I put them all in the same totalitarian nuisance box and disregard. I really don't think any of that kind of belief is going to catch on. It seems stale and foreign. I have a hard time empathizing with the English or the Dutch because I live in a country that left those places because their religions and corporations were stupid. Similarly the other religions strike me as stupid, especially where they require self-effacement, and philosophically with Judaism in the case where they amphibolously use the same word to denote race, religion and ethnicity, and where they seem to confuse self and other. I keep reading or hearing where a person who quits Judaism is accused of self-hate. This is very totalitarian as the accusing Jew is claiming the self of the other Jew. I fail to distinguish this form of collectivized interloping of the self from forms within Islam or Christianity.

Touchstone

"essentially not my language and not my intellectual or behavioral or legal leash"

They're not mine either, as a matter of fact. I'm agnostic. But we needn't subscribe to any of these monotheisms to realize that the billions of believers exert an influence that can't be ignored. Religious extremism is a problem for everyone, but Muslim extremism is particularly problematic because of its large and growing numbers, and the intensity of its bloodlust and intolerance.

"by Muhammad, by The Lubavitcher Rebbe, or by Jesus or Mayor Bloomberg or the Police"

Muslim extremists are drawing far more lines in the sand (and with more serious consequences for crossing them) than anyone else you're compelled to name out of a misguided need to draw false equivalencies.

"use the same word to denote race, religion and ethnicity"

That's not something deliberate or calculated that can be blamed on Jews. Tell me how people can say I "look Jewish" but I should use the term only to denote my religion (which, in fact, is something I don't practise). It's a fact of life, not of someone's demonic invention, that "Jew" designates both an ethnicity and a religion. If anyone can be held accountable, the non-Jewish Europeans of the 20th century are to blame for classifying Jews as a race and using race, not religion, as a basis for persecution. If the wolf pack defines us as a race, are we simply to ignore such designations? If we're defined along religious lines (as during the Inquisition), can we afford to ignore that either? Just based on patterns of persecution alone, Jews have been defined by the rest of the world, not by ourselves, as alternately a religious and a racial group. Jews can't afford to pretend that we can define ourselves how we like and the world will comply. To a large extent, we're all defined in the eyes of others. There are labels we slap on ourselves, and there are those applied to us by others. Both are real. Both are inescapable. I don't know who's responsible, I just know what the reality is: "Jewish" is both a racial and religious designation, unfortunately subject to endless clarifications.

Touchstone

"I intend to destroy all this nonsense about Muslims taking over the world and Israelis defending us from it"

Who are you to intend such a thing? That's quite grandiose and egomaniacal of you. Even the POTUS couldn't hope to accomplish such a feat. Maybe what you mean is you've joined the army of online multitudes whose desperate cries in the wind have even less consequence than their vote.

"I am heartened that people like yourself can take a moment and remind yourself that, no, Muslims are not such a big deal after all, that both Muslim and Jews now have people ready to eat their arms off to shut them up."

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the scale of the threat depends on certain factors, like one's location. Jews in Israel have more to fear from Muslims than Jews in West Palm Beach. Christians in Egypt have more to fear from Muslims than Christians in Birmingham, who in turn have more to fear from Muslims than Christians in Nashville. The history of Islam predicts that Muslims will be at odds with non-Muslims indefinitely. Overall that's certainly a "big deal", but it's less of a deal when Muslims are vastly outnumbered or outgunned, and when they're not being provoked. It's a bigger deal when extremists proliferate (as in Egypt), when Muslim immigrant populations overwhelm indigenous peoples (as in Europe), when Islamic nations crumble (as in Syria), or when very unstable Islamic nations possess WMD (eg. Pakistan's nukes; Syria's chemical weapons). But it's also a fairly big deal when Western society allows Muslims to take certain liberties, like intimidating Jewish students on campus. That bodes ill for everyone's future. It's not an apocalyptic threat like Pakistan's nukes falling into the hands of extremists, but it's still a cause for some alarm. If you feel like you're justified in eating somebody's arms off for complaining about such troubling developments, then obviously you're part of the problem. You should be siding with Jews or any other minority on campus who's not permitted to safely express their views or exchange ideas. For all your verbiage, you're keen to espouse violent means to shut people up. You present yourself as someone highly evolved who, paradoxically, seeks the most primitive of solutions.

"I am not arrogant."

What is your intent to "destroy all this nonsense" if not a sign of arrogance on a galactic scale? Not to mention many other self-flattering, self-aggrandizing remarks, like your boast about your "extravagant" intellectual gifts. Perhaps you should follow a sentence like "I am not arrogant" with "I am not self-aware."

"I don't think you like me."

You're trying very hard to be disliked by everyone; if you've achieved success in the attempt, it should come as no surprise. Anyone who carpet-bombs a comments section with insults and provocations will find himself roundly disliked. Action and reaction. It's Newtonian.

"I do not hate. Not anyone. Grouping is not hating. Categorizing is not hating."

I concede that your response to my invective was far more good-natured than I expected. That said, an anthology of your anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, pro-Ford, etc comments would read like a manifesto of hate, or at least extreme callousness and prejudice.

As for grouping and categorizing, they are at the very least reductive. When the group or category in question is being ridiculed or slandered or unfairly accused, it's not absurd to conclude that the author of the generalization is hateful.

"Your most compelling attempt was to state that Jews are not defined as oppressed. But then you hung onto the idea that they are."

No, I'm saying two distinct things. One is that "Jew" isn't synonymous with "victim". It designates a race or religion or "ethnic" group, independent of the history of that group or the physical or socioeconomic state of that group at any given time. The other thing is that, because of the long history of Jewish victimization by non-Jews, it's understandable why Jews as a group would always be anticipating the next round of victimization. You're a case in point with your talk of eating Jewish arms off (and other such remarks, like ringing Ben Shapiro's neck). Read what folks here have written about how apprehensive they are of what you represent: a coming wave of anti-Jewish violence in America, not perpetrated by Muslims but by whites and other non-Muslims. So if the ever-present concern about when the next pogrom will hit constitutes "oppression", then yes, Jews are to some extent "oppressed" by such terrifying prospects. History screams at us that Jews will continue to be scapegoated and persecuted. That said, there are certainly times and places when Jews do very well for themselves and carry on just fine, regardless of all the historical, fact-based, reality-derived and therefore prudent worry that comes with the territory of being Jewish in a non-Jewish and historically/periodically hostile world.

Schlomotion

At what point do we stop accusing a man of being egomaniacal and grandiose? Must he annex all of Europe? Conquer Carthage? Cure cancer? Lead an exodus of 144,000? Where we differ, is that I simply accept that it is within my ability. I don't feel that I make claims if I cannot fulfill them. Why bother? One reads books where a man says he will sack Alexandria, and then he does. One reads an address where a man says he will keep the Union together and then he does. At some point, scoffing takes on the form of John Wilkes Booth, or Yigal Amir, or James Earl Ray. I look at the people who went from saying that Ron Paul didn't exist, to he is a kook, to he is a spoiler, to finally, he must die. People scoff at individuals until the individual gets the Panama Canal built, or designs a flying machine, etc. It is easy to tell polymaths that they are grandiose and unaccomplished narcissists. Sure. Sometimes they are. And sometimes they do know quite a bit in depth about everything. We don't live in a society that rewards polymaths, we live in a society that rewards mimics. I posit that most of this fear of Islam crap and love of Israel crap is just our society rewarding mimicry. Terrorism is mimicry. Fear of terrorism is mimicry. That which we cannot mimic in this society we can frame others as a mimic thereof. It is easy to frame me as a white supremacist, as a threat to the Jews because I am adversarial to many things including some of the Jewish franchises. I do the opposite of slavishly avoiding the accusation of antisemitism. All one need do is provide a slight resistance to Jewish views and a very large reaction comes into play. You have eloquently described how it came into being historically, and I agree with the factuality of your description. It is all very understandable, but pickpocketing is understandable. Traffic jams are understandable. But I as a human being still intend to move. Not wait out a 20 year global depression, not stand in a backscatter scanner, and certainly not go to war with Iran or be led by the nose over the supposed rise of Islamic threat to western civilization that is always commensurate with Israeli border disputes.

Touchstone

One dictionary definition of "polymath" is "a person learned in many fields". Surely we do "live in a society that rewards polymaths". You're putting yourself forward as something else: an individual who will single-handedly remake the world. Unfortunately, such ambitions will indeed sound grandiose until realized. That perception is most likely not limited to any one society in particular. While you do make some interesting points about mimicry, innovation is rewarded a great deal as well. Consider Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Facebook, Google, etc. And just because "sometimes they do know quite a bit in depth about everything", so what? It takes more than just erudition to accomplish the extraordinary.

Also, what you regard as mimicry may in fact be self-protective common sense. Fear of terrorism isn't merely "mimicry" when the fears are well-founded. Fear isn't always a sign of folly; often it's a sign that one clearly recognizes an existing danger.

"provide a slight resistance to Jewish views"

Slight resistance, you say? Some 1300 posts on this site – many of which explode with sweeping denunciations, callous disparagements and flippant slanders – tell a different tale. And what exactly are "Jewish views"? There you go again, lumping us all together. As an agnostic, some of my views surely aren't in sync with what you consider "Jewish views".

"the supposed rise of Islamic threat to western civilization that is always commensurate with Israeli border disputes"

That's the kind of glib, Israel-centric hostility which reveals you to be someone who isn't willing or able to see past the one little country he blames for everything. I think something else is going on: International jihadism may have been intensified by the Arab-Israeli conflict, but since its roots are so much deeper (originating with Muhammad), it's more like a sleeping giant that's been awakened, inspired to fulfill what it sees as its ancient destiny of world domination and subjugation. It now has a momentum of its own, so even if Israel was destroyed, the giant's bloodlust wouldn't be quenched; indeed, it would increase. The giant openly wants to conquer Europe and, eventually, America. You scoff at this notion in the same breath that you chide me for scoffing at your grandiosity. But unlike your grand ambition, the jihadist dream of oppressing the world is bolstered by ample evidence of Muslim conquests over the centuries, by current demographic trends in Europe and elsewhere, and by the fact that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world. And while we're on the subject of taking lofty dreamers seriously (which was your own proposal, I remind you), remember that the Nazis started out as a little band of fanatics, dismissed and scoffed at until they weren't.

If you want me to take your own egomaniacal dream seriously, then please take seriously the equally grand ambitions of MILLIONS of fanatical jihadists, and also consider the fact that if so much damage could be done by one determined little rabble-rouser in a Munich beer-hall, why couldn't far more damage be done by MILLIONS of such nutjobs scattered all over the globe?

As you said: "One reads books where a man says he will sack Alexandria, and then he does." Indeed. And one reads books where a man (Hitler) says he'll exterminate all the Jews, and he does. One also hears speeches where a man (Nasrallah, Khamenei, Morsi, take your pick) says he'll do the same, and … he doesn't, because, thankfully, a few Jews managed to learn some valuable lessons from history, and wisely ignored the supercilious bleatings of myopic critics who upbraid Jews for worrying excessively.

Quite honestly, I think you've been checkmated by your own inconsistency here. If your thesis is that one man's ambitions should never be scoffed at, then it's about damn time for you to stop scoffing at the notion that not one, not two, but MILLIONS of fanatically determined jihadists might very well achieve THEIR diabolical ambitions, ESPECIALLY if people don't take them seriously. "All it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing."

This could and should be a moment of epiphany for you. I hope you finally see the light after laying this trap for yourself and stepping right into it. How blinded to your own logic you've been by your irrational hatred of one little faraway country.

Schlomotion

Part one:

This reply of yours is the plateau I had been hoping we would get to.

It is an epiphany for me, as you suggest, but the way it works out might be different than you think.

I knew for some exchanges that we were building this trap and that it would need to be stepped in. But we are not playing chess. I don't hate Israel. I don't hate Jews. I am not blinded to my own logic. I am doing this on purpose. I want to use the inconsistency that I have employed, knowing its weaknesses. I will attempt to prove this.

We are playing Semites vs Antisemites, and alas, it is merely a game. Maybe it's a war game, a psychological game, a dramatic game, an art game, whatever you want to call it. It is a parlor game. Yes, it has real world ramifications. You and I are real people, and real people are reading what we write. Some don't understand, some do. Some bluff that they don't care, some actually don't care. JIDF cares. The authors care. The webmasters care. The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI care. Mossad cares. I can't prove all of those particular things here because I cannot give you my memories. I have interacted with those groups. Take it or leave it. That's not what I said I was attempting to prove. Anyway, those groups I mention have the moves in this game: monitor, squash, interfere, use. That makes it a little like chess, because they can only move in certain directions.

Some of the players here, like Roger Russell/Jeepwonder are playing Tic Tac Toe or Ping Pong or Slapjack inside this game. It's all they get out of it. Low bids, quick hits, the tiniest possible returns on plays. Mo_ and some of the other players are just doing sophist battles. Stern and BS77 are trying to do little shun wars. The ones who keep demanding consistency and proof and links have not grown past Bertrand Russell and Kurt Godel. They might go as far as think that this whole defense of the Jews from the Left premise is really a complete system like Principia Mathematica with concordances and complete internal consistency. The born agains think in that Manichean binary way as well, so they are comfortable here too. They don't think up to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, and they don't think past Anselm's Proslogion, or Pascal's Wager. They mimic those last two anyway. They don't reason it. Many people here can't think past the liberal/conservative dichotomy or the semite/antisemite dichotomy or left/right, and nearly all of them unconsciously follow Aristotle's rule of excluded middle.

In these debates, I have deliberately moved (illegally) to prove a contradiction. You have acknowledged that I moved my inconsistency to prove a contradiction and called checkmate. There we are on the same page. My reason for doing so is my observation that Semites vs Antisemites is an omega-inconsistent gameboard. That is to say, all of these things that prove someone is a Jew, or a Semite, and all of these things that prove someone is an Antisemite also prove everyone else is, and also that some nonstandard opponent or person somehow violates all of human comprehension or psychology. Semites vs. Antisemites is broken. Jew is broken. Jew-Hater is broken. All of these items are dysfunctional and misshapen.

So yes. If Muslims are a threat, then I am the next Hitler. If the little engine could, then Ahmedinejad certainly can. Otherwise if I am a nobody, then Muslims are a nobody. Or as we have read here, Jews are either the most ingenious and envied people on the earth or alternately, they are a tiny threatened minority of inconsequential people who only matter to frightened bigots. Or Muslims are. Or I am. Exposing this brokenness has been my aim. I fault this whole world problemmatique for its omega-inconsistency. I said I was out to dismantle the ideals you uphold. That is true if you uphold the consistency and the omega-consistency of this whole us/them illusion. It doesn't hold for me. I am a Jew, a Muslim, a Christian, an Atheist and a Gentile. I don't mean that like I am a fantastic tapestry of superficial allegiances. I mean that none of those categories can be expected to consistently hold a person's identity. They are all costumes from a trunk in granddad's attic. As you said, there aren't "Jewish views" any more than there are "Black views" or "Chinese views" that can be commuted consistently to a whole.

Touchstone

"I don't hate Israel. I don't hate Jews." — Difficult to believe, in light of your infinite put-downs. I think you feel the need to keep reminding yourself of this (seeming) fiction. Maybe you shudder at the prospect that you might be full of the same all-consuming hatred that compelled so many before you to do some truly heinous things.

"I want to use the inconsistency that I have employed" – I want to use it too, as a way of proving to you that you've lost all credibility and must now become an ardent Zionist. Seriously, your arguments ring hollow. You want me to believe you will achieve your grandiose ambitions but you also want me to stop taking the threats from jihadists seriously. You expect me to mind your ambitions but dismiss those of the millions who scream Allahu Akbar. I'm supposed to believe that you're a genuine opponent, whereas they're just phantoms.

"We are playing Semites vs Antisemites, and alas, it is merely a game" — It isn't a game to Jews targeted by flash mobs. It isn't a game if you live in Toulouse or Malmo or Mumbai or Jerusalem or if you're Lara Logan in Cairo, who was gang-raped by savages screaming "Jew! Jew!" It wasn't a game during all those pogroms and wars. It may seem like a parlor game when the blood still hasn't started flowing in copious amounts, but a calm before the storm doesn't mean it's all just a game. It's as serious as it gets. Life and limb serious.

"real people are reading what we write" — I'd be surprised if any of those you list are bothering to read our exchanges. For one thing, this thread has long passed out of view. You sound quite paranoid. Maybe it's the residual paranoia of a traumatic experience that's compelling you to obsess over these things.

"think in that Manichean binary way" — Binary thinking seems inappropriate during a lull, but it makes perfect sense when the storm hits, or when it's coming. Since there have been so many storms, and there's always another one brewing with the potential for mass casualty events, it's understandable why thoughts so often turn to extreme scenarios and Manichean views.

Is it your familiarity with Godel, Anselm, Pascal and others that tempts you to avail of their various theorems at precisely the moment when you need a crutch to lean on because your own glaring inconsistencies have knocked you off balance? I'm not conversant with these theorems and I can't escape feeling like this is all a dodge on your part to avoid a point-blank acceptance of the fact that you're indefensibly hypocritical when you insist on having your own ambitions taken seriously while fervently belittling others for exaggerating threats from jihadists.

"if I am a nobody, then Muslims are a nobody" — Why are you offering the most extreme, binary choices? And have you considered the possibility that you will prove to be a comparatively inconsequential nobody in the face of legions of apoplectic Muslim Jew-haters who collectively possess an immeasurably greater magnitude of threat-potential than you ever will? Why should I conclude that millions of fanatical Muslims could ever possibly amount to zero on the threat-to-Jews scale? How is that rational? Why should that baseless, imprudent notion be considered at all in conjunction with your own potential for causing mayhem? Where are your legions? Where is your holy book? Where is your 1400 year history of conquest? Where is your conquered territory of hemispheric proportions? Where are the mountains of ashes and debris left in the wake of the uncountable bombs you've detonated? Who are you to be likened to a clear and proven danger of such vast dimensions?

"none of those categories can be expected to consistently hold a person's identity" — Aren't you the one who reminded me that categorizations and generalizations are necessary in the course of a discussion? Categories do hold some fraction of identity, short of the whole. They have their utility, however limited. But this topic is a digression from the revelation of your hypocrisy involving lofty ambitions and threats.

Schlomotion

I have considered it before, and I absolutely not inclined to commit heinous acts due to hatred. It is part of my overarching knowledge that I am not to be compelled.

I do not deny being an ardent Zionist. What is bad about Der Judenstaat? It is ambitious, compelling, and it speaks to any builder with a sense of adventure. I deny being a complete Zionist and able to give myself over fully to that -ism. I am fighting a partial-Zionist's battle against people who think you have to be a complete Zionist. I have not touted the purity of anti-Zionism.

"Targeted by flash mobs" reads as such a white person's problem.

I feel bad about Lara Logan, but why is it, I feel equally bad about Rachel Corrie, but to a Zionist one is a human and the other isn't?

I am not worried about paranoia. I have vetted myself for most phobias. Some people read everything they can find. So probably some people read this. I think they would be edified if their compulsions led them here.

If binary thinking is permissible when the storm comes or when the SHTF, then why can Ms. Napolitano target preppers who just five years ago were being encouraged by Tom Ridge to stock up on duct tape and hide under polyethylene if the Terror Warning reads Orange? Why are Jews allowed to pack bug-out bags, but Americans not? What makes Jews sacred victims and makes regular old Americans terrorists? Taxpayers want to know.

I use "crutches" or props at the same times and for the same reasons as Wittgenstein said. A man uses props. Even his arms and legs are props. Even God gave Moses a staff. I don't think it is hypocritical to have ambitions while challenging the ambitions of others. In fact, it goes with the territory. I have dug myself out the morass of Judeo-Christian centric thought in much the same way Mr. Horowitz has dug himself out of leftism. We do not all have a shared ambition and exodus point.

"have you considered the possibility that you will prove to be a comparatively inconsequential nobody in the face of legions of apoplectic Muslim Jew-haters who collectively possess an immeasurably greater magnitude of threat-potential than you ever will?"

What is maple syrup, gleaned and boiled down from all those trees without the pancake to put it on?

I do like your questions. Indeed. When I wake up in the morning, after a lucid sleep I do ask myself the same thing. How do I measure up to all of Islam? Or Hitler, or Christendom, or even the guy who runs Malden Mills. I ask the same questions you just did. Do you know how hard it is to say "at least I saved someone's life today" is to accept for an answer? Some days you just want to build pyramids and divert rivers instead. You can liken me to Timothy McVeigh, except I refuse to harm innocent people. You can liken me to Robert Oppenheimer but I have refused to design nuclear warheads. You can liken me to whole host of people who just decided not to do what he was capable of because that is what so many other people do every day to the detriment of all. One of my best features is my inaction. I choose to act in small and focused ways, what you call my monomania.

I would love to discuss hypocrisy more as really it is sort of a religious accusation.

Schlomotion

I have considered it before, and I am absolutely not inclined to commit heinous acts due to hatred. It is part of my overarching knowledge that I am not to be compelled.

I do not deny being an ardent Zionist. What is bad about Der Judenstaat? It is ambitious, compelling, and it speaks to any builder with a sense of adventure. I deny being a complete Zionist and able to give myself over fully to that -ism. I am fighting a partial-Zionist's battle against people who think you have to be a complete Zionist. I have not touted the purity of anti-Zionism.

"Targeted by flash mobs" reads as such a white person's problem.

I feel bad about Lara Logan, but why is it, I feel equally bad about Rachel Corrie, but to a Zionist one is a human and the other isn't?

I am not worried about paranoia. I have vetted myself for most phobias. Some people read everything they can find. So probably some people read this. I think they would be edified if their compulsions led them here.

If binary thinking is permissible when the storm comes or when the SHTF, then why can Ms. Napolitano target preppers who just five years ago were being encouraged by Tom Ridge to stock up on duct tape and hide under polyethylene if the Terror Warning reads Orange? Why are Jews allowed to pack bug-out bags, but Americans not? What makes Jews sacred victims and makes regular old Americans terrorists? Taxpayers want to know.

I use "crutches" or props at the same times and for the same reasons as Wittgenstein said. A man uses props. Even his arms and legs are props. Even God gave Moses a staff. I don't think it is hypocritical to have ambitions while challenging the ambitions of others. In fact, it goes with the territory. I have dug myself out the morass of Judeo-Christian centric thought in much the same way Mr. Horowitz has dug himself out of leftism. We do not all have a shared ambition and exodus point.

"have you considered the possibility that you will prove to be a comparatively inconsequential nobody in the face of legions of apoplectic Muslim Jew-haters who collectively possess an immeasurably greater magnitude of threat-potential than you ever will?"

What is maple syrup, gleaned and boiled down from all those trees without the pancake to put it on?

I do like your questions. Indeed. When I wake up in the morning, after a lucid sleep I do ask myself the same thing. How do I measure up to all of Islam? Or Hitler, or Christendom, or even the guy who runs Malden Mills. I ask the same questions you just did. Do you know how hard "at least I saved someone's life today" is to accept for an answer? Some days you just want to build pyramids and divert rivers instead. You can liken me to Timothy McVeigh, except I refuse to harm innocent people. You can liken me to Robert Oppenheimer but I have refused to design nuclear warheads. You can liken me to whole host of people who just decided not to do what he was capable of because that is what so many other people do every day to the detriment of all. One of my best features is my inaction. I choose to act in small and focused ways, what you call my monomania.

I would love to discuss hypocrisy more as really it is sort of a religious accusation.

Touchstone

"such a white person's problem" — It's easy to be glib and dismiss it until it happens to you or someone you know.

"I feel bad about Lara Logan, but why is it, I feel equally bad about Rachel Corrie, but to a Zionist one is a human and the other isn't?" — The question you should ask is why do you feel the need to equate two very different incidents and change the subject to Corrie? This is the mark of an anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist obsessive. You can't bear to let stand any mention of an episode that condemns Islamic savagery without appending a reflexively anti-Jewish comment, transforming the topic into something you prefer. You feel compelled by your crusade-like agenda to steer the discussion towards atrocities for which you can blame Jews and therefore feel vindicated. The vindication that accrues from smearing Jews feels a lot more satisfying than having no answer for gang-raping Muslim barbarians. How many times would you estimate you've changed the subject since you started posting here? Not only must we now discuss Corrie, but also why unfeeling extraterrestrial Zionist monsters don't see her as "human". Sure, that's the problem. The Zionist's inability to discern humanity in a person. Right. Gotcha. Lara who?

"I have vetted myself" — That carries no weight whatsoever. The nature of vetting precludes one from vetting oneself. The very idea is nonsensical. As is your claim that you'd never commit violence, just because you've decided it's not in you… despite all the violent imagery in your comments, such as "ringing the neck" of Ben Shapiro. If you can fantasize about it and write about it with such frequency, you can't be positive you couldn't act on such obsessions. But you CLAIM to be positive, and therein lies the folly of hubris, something you possess in great abundance.

"Why are Jews allowed to pack bug-out bags, but Americans not? What makes Jews sacred victims and makes regular old Americans terrorists?" — What a pile of rubbish. There's a TV show called "Doomsday Preppers". Obviously, these preppers aren't breaking the law, and if they were they wouldn't broadcast what they're doing! Preppers abound, and most of them aren't Jewish, as the show demonstrates. Who the hell is forbidden from prepping? The premise of your Jew-baiting whine is complete garbage. For shame. Now you're resorting to outright lies.

You've truly outdone yourself in the Indefensible BS department. This post was a blunt reminder that I've been devoting too much time to respond thoughtfully to a person who's ranting thoughtlessly. If the best you're capable of is the yawningly predictable change-the-subject-and-whine-about-the-Jews routine, I can find that crap anywhere.

"I have refused to design nuclear warheads" — Am I to refrain from scoffing at the hubris of equating yourself intellectually to Oppenheimer? Have you refused to design warheads, or do you simply lack the ability? Have you refused to posit theories as ingenious as relativity, or are you simply unable to? Newton invented calculus. Have you refused to invent your own branch of mathematics, or is the task beyond your capacities? Have you refused to paint the equivalent of the Sistine Chapel as well, or is lack of artistic talent holding you back? Are you bipolar? Is that the source of your quasi-psychotic grandiose ravings? I think I've had my fill of this silliness.

"One of my best features is my inaction" — May you continue to benefit the world with continued idleness. (It should be pointed out that you've unwittingly contradicted yourself again. Earlier you claimed that you have no capacity for violence, but now you're suggesting that you deliberately refrain from committing acts of domestic terrorism. Which is it? Are you UNABLE to commit acts of violence because you're naturally peaceful, or are you consciously RESTRAINING yourself from doing what your heart desires? Inaction in this context is NOT a virtue if you lack the potential to act in the first place. That would be like me claiming to have "decided" not to rampage like the Hulk and lay waste to cities with my bare hands, when in fact I never had the potential to do such damage.)

"I would love to discuss hypocrisy more as really it is sort of a religious accusation." — More nonsense. More changing the subject. Anything to escape a harsh truth you can't handle, whether it's about inadvertently stepping in a pile of your own BS, or finding yourself at a loss to acknowledge the serious implications of Muslim antisemitism in the Lara Logan attack.

Schlomotion

You are doing rank, and I emphasize rank sophistry here. I can't say enough times that the finding of contradictions is cheap. I don't speculate the reasons why you do it. I really don't know.

I know that I say things without concern over whether they are believed. Instilling beliefs is not one of my goals.

You twisted one thing I said, that I am not capable of violence. I did not say that at all. I am certainly capable of violence. I said that I intend none and I refrain from it. That is obviously different from not being capable of it.

Rachel Corrie is fair trade for Lara Logan. They are both women, both humans, both innocent, and both victims. When one human being is harmed, humanity is harmed. Israel owes humanity a strong apology for running Rachel Corrie over with a bulldozer. Until they do it, I will not give their laments priority. I will add them to the in-pile of sadness generated in the Middle East and view it all relativistically when demanded to prioritize Israeli suffering. Right now, Israelis are being bad people. It is sensible to withhold full sympathy for Israel when it kills American citizens.

Touchstone

You pompously said, "It is part of my overarching knowledge that I am not to be compelled." If you KNOW you can't be compelled to commit violence, that weakens your claim that you're doing humanity a favor by DECIDING not to commit violence. You either CAN be compelled but decide you won't be (thereby admirably exerting your will over your feral compulsions), or you CAN'T be compelled under any circumstances and therefore don't need to exert your will over your non-existent compulsions. What's "cheap" isn't my finding of contradictions, it's your weasel-like attempts to wriggle out of the holes you keep digging for yourself. I don't go looking for contradictions in your statements. They jump out at me.

"Right now, Israelis are being bad people." — A breathtakingly sweeping generalization with virtually no meaning or impact. Pure guilt-by-association boilerplate, calculated to indict an entire nation based on the highly propagandized acts of a few.

None of this changes my premise: You changed the subject to Corrie when it was originally about the implications of the Logan attack. It wasn't about the tragic consequences for the two women. It was about the fact that the Muslim rapists were chanting "Jew! Jew!" You steered the conversation into a series of comments about how bad Israelis are, conveniently avoiding the topic at hand: the phenomenon of Islamic antisemitism and its implications. That very specific topic has NOTHING to do with Corrie. Your mention of her was gratuitous and irrelevant and the tactic of someone trying to dodge the issue at hand. You could have mentioned ANY victim killed ANYWHERE by ANYBODY and it would have been just as meaningless unless it amplified the topic of pan-Islamic ambitions to decimate Jewry.

Alas, gangs of Muslims behaving like human piranhas don't interest you. What interests you is bashing Israel … while claiming to be a Zionist to boot. Sophistry, anyone?

Schlomotion

It's pompous to have a dominating self-knowledge that precludes being compelled? That's news to me. It's modest to not "nosce te ipsum," to be self-agnostic and easy to compel? That is such a blasphemy of logos. What a slander of human cognition.

Humans, humans humans. Israeli humans and Muslim humans are no better than one another. They are both wrong when they try to stand on each others' heads. Muslims are also especially wrong when they chop their minds short and blow themselves up. Jews are especially wrong when they deify their own sufferings and use it to purchase the right to howl against the strong, against the self-knowing, and against the Western values of republic.

Look, I'm sorry the Romans trashed Jerusalem. But Republic really is a good idea. Free democratic republic is an even better idea. Well defined borders and international peace is an awesome idea.

The sweeping generalization of Palestinians as a fake people unworthy of living in their own yards, and the sweeping generalization of Americans as aloof or hostile to the national ambitions of Israel is a bad idea. It's a bad move. It generates antipathy.

Look: Israel was just omitted from a US led meeting about terrorism.

Touchstone

"they deify their own sufferings" — There's no getting through to you. Great suffering (as the result of great injustice, which is the key point you overlook) can't go unmentioned or unremembered. Lessons from history must continually be taught. But not to people who think pebbles contain wisdom. You can take your callous hyperbole and go share it with the earthworms whose company so edifies you.

"against the Western values of republic" — Bunk, I say. Judaism forms part of the bedrock of "Western values". The Greeks don't get all the credit.

"Look: Israel was just omitted from a US led meeting about terrorism." — You naively and, as always, reflexively assume that "Israeli bad behavior" is to blame. It never occurs to you that perhaps Israel is being discriminated against for self-serving reasons. If you can jump at the chance to bash Israel, no matter how unfairly, you won't pass it up. You're as much a Zionist as Spencer is a ballerina. Tell me another one.

Schlomotion

Pebbles do contain wisdom. Try to run a marathon with a pebble in your shoe. As one of the first animals and the basis of the human, earthworms contain innumerable elements of wisdom. The worm gave much more to the chordate and consequently homo sapiens than the Torah gave to homo sapiens.

I would not be surprised, actually if Spencer is a ballerina. His favorite dancing posture would be the anti-arabesque.

How do you use the word "self-serving" for all these instances except for Israeli actions?

Touchstone

Yes, of course pebbles and earthworms can elucidate a great deal, but it's a very specific kind of truth. I'm dismissing them ONLY as surrogates for what history can teach us, not as sources of other kinds of knowledge, and only because you disparage history in favor of nature. I'm tired of explaining to you that history and nature are both valuable in their own right, that both teach different things. If you hadn't arrogantly dismissed an entire field of study as a "lying ass" we wouldn't be pursuing this silly digression.

Predictably, you couldn't resist sticking it to the Jews yet again by trivializing the influence scripture has had on humanity (which is vast and profound). Predictably, you couldn't resist dodging the point about how naive and mistaken you are about why Israel is unwelcome at international events (where the appeasement of various faraway nations takes precedence over sensibly including such a juicy target of terrorism, and such an expert on counter-terrorism, like Israel).

Mention a Muslim radical, and you offer no counterpoint or defense. You change the subject to Rachel Corrie. Mention the self-serving exclusion of Israel from one specific conference, and you offer no counterpoint or defense. You change the subject to how self-serving Israel is. Nyah nyah nyah, says Schlomotion.

You can't address the topic at hand. You go searching for Israel's wrongdoing as a way of justifying the specific wrongdoing under discussion. Why should I indulge you? Why should I allow you to change the subject so easily? Yes, of course Israel can be self-serving; every nation pursues its interests. But we're not speaking generally. We're talking about this particular conference. Of course, you don't want to focus on that. Just like you never want to focus very long on the stark evidence of Islamic intolerance. No, you have to mention Rachel Corrie. I suppose you think that furnishes an adequate defense to counter any criticism or even observation about jihad.

Schlomotion

"Mention a Muslim radical, and you offer no counterpoint or defense."

Correct. Because they are indefensible. I don't defend Muslims here. Figuratively speaking, the enemy of my enemy is just my enemy's enemy. Both Muslims and Jews are obnoxious in this world battle of attrition.

"Mention the self-serving exclusion of Israel from one specific conference, and you offer no counterpoint or defense. "

Sure I do. Israel is an obnoxious pariah state that thwarts peace in the region by devaluing and disobeying peace accords. Why have them at a meeting with one of our other allies who Israel tried to steal the whole sea from and failed?

Touchstone

"Israel is an obnoxious pariah state" — Spoken like a self-described endorser of Herzl. (Odd that I don't believe you when you claim to be a Zionist).

While it's true that you've developed considerable expertise at playing the obnoxious pariah, what you're really saying is that Israel is obnoxiously bent on surviving despite all the attempts to crush it, and despite all the ill will directed against it (such as those of your ilk). That darned Israel just won't bend the knee, eh sire?

"devaluing and disobeying peace accords" — Oh, you mean the trash that wasn't worth the paper it was printed on? The so-called "peace accords" signed with genocidal nutjobs who want to kill every last Jew? Right, nothing wrong with THOSE guys!

Schlomotion

I bet Herzl would level the same criticism that I did.

Schlomotion

Part two:

My Pascal's Wager on myself is that I will realize my grandiose claims. In some areas I have. Between me and me, I had better bet I am real than run the risk of doubting myself. That is not what I am trying to prove to you either. I was using that as leverage to hedge bet against Zionism because I have as much faith in myself as everyone on this site has in Zionism, perhaps more. Israel I do not hate. It is a nation. It is a flawed but manageable narcissistic corporate act with proven merits and existential substance. As I said, I read and agree with Der Judenstaat. However, I also agree with Message to the Blackman in America, with Mein Kampf, the Koran, at least in the way that they are ambitious visions to carve out grand halls for humanity. I also reject all of them because they usurp freedom and the individual. I am against genocide of any group. I am against censorship and economic warfare against good people. I like these little bands of fanatics in some ways and hate them in others. Where individually or collectively they achieve something other than theft, murder, destruction, and the obliteration of science and relics, I don't care what their race or -ism is.

Touchstone

"I have as much faith in myself as everyone on this site has in Zionism" — An odd conflation. Your faith in yourself is confidence. I don't have "confidence" in Zionism. I wouldn't put it like that. I believe it makes sense. There's a justification for it. Jewry needs a place of refuge from a viciously hostile world. It's justified for that place to be located where it is, given that it's the only spot Jews ever had a homeland, whereas it's just another conquered territory (one of many) from the perspective of Arabs and Muslims. Zionism advances the argument that a modern Jewish homeland is a necessity, a demonstrably logical and supportable position. It's even more supportable when one considers that Israel's existence helps secure the position of Jews who live outside it as well. Jews now have both a diaspora and a homeland, not just a vulnerable diaspora. That helps put Jews on an equal footing with many other ethnic groups, such as Italians, Germans, Irish, and so on.

"Where individually or collectively they achieve something…" — That might imply that you'd be OK if fanatics discover medical treatments even if they were a result of vivisections sans anaesthesia. You're saying the ends justify the means.

Schlomotion

I do combine (or conflate) the two because *-ism denotes "as a means." So, Zion, as a means. Capital as a means. Commune as a means.

People choose these means. And we can ask "as a means to what?" At a glance it appears the answer is always "as a means to self-assurance." Not necessarily confidence as a synonym. The assurance of self-preservation, like proof of immortality. People presume they will cheat death if only they amass enough capital, or enough people, or enough Jews, or enough mirrors, or enough housepride, or enough genders, or enough vegetables on their plates.

No. I don't think the ends always justify the means. I think the Nuremberg Codes (informed consent) was a major breakthrough in human ethics.

Touchstone

How ironic that the more people like you threaten Jews and excoriate them for exaggerating or imagining their oppression, the more that state of cerebral oppression runs the risk of escalating into outright persecution in some form. You want to muzzle Jews and forbid them from worrying at all, threatening to physically harm them should they not comply. How can you fail to see that you're justifying the same fears you claim are baseless? However loudly you rail, the warnings of history will drown you out every time. The Jew always has reason to fear. That's what history tells us, and you're living proof.

"One need not experience the full degree of oppression to have faced it."

Or one can simply be guilty of exaggerating and hyping one's oppression, precisely the activities for which one is blaming today's Jews.

Your contention is problematic. If people are allowed to claim parity with the victims of Nazis because they experienced something unpleasant, that means the whole world can pretend they've been victimized by the most extreme oppressors, regardless of how mild their ordeals actually were. If I stub my toe, does that mean I should liken myself to a tortured prisoner who had his feet beaten with sticks, on the basis that my pain, while of much lesser magnitude, bears a faint but definite resemblance to the prisoner's greater pain? Who gets to decide who should be compared to whom? And what percentage of another person's pain does one need to experience before one can declare one's kinship?

"show me that because I dismiss Muslim extremism I am opening the door to have it happen"

Well, that applies to taking a passive approach to ANY threat. China, North Korea, and Russia are a few examples of non-Muslim adversaries. One can't open the door, for example, to a computer virus originating in China that targets American systems. The threats from Muslim fanatics are one of many potential threats to contend with. You're obsessed with minimizing only the Muslim threat, presumably because you despise the Jews who pay attention to it. Maybe you don't care about any other threats because there aren't Jews to blame for whatever precautions are in place for countering them.

If Israel ceased to exist tomorrow, that wouldn't reduce the Muslim threat to zero, and you know it. There will always be Muslims who collect grievances and seek revenge, no matter how far back in history the perceived wrong occurred. The need to remain vigilant against such threats can't be blamed on Jews. The temptation to scapegoat Jews for complex civilizational problems is ever-present and you've fallen victim to it. And that ties in with what I said about Jews not being oppressed but fearing an inevitable sequel to previous oppressions, a fear which is a species of oppression in itself. There's far too much blaming of Jews going on. At some point you've got to hold Muslims accountable for their hateful words and violent deeds without reflexively blaming Jews for provoking them. Whatever grievances bin Laden had, it was MUSLIM FANATICS who followed through on their own decision to slaughter thousands on 9/11.

In the spirit of not letting one's guard down, the more you and others talk of devouring Jewish limbs, the more Jews should be wary of "opening the door to have it happen", as you put it. All threats have this feature in common: the need for vigilance. It can only be folly to dismiss violent threats from hateful people, whether they're Muslims or anyone else.

Schlomotion

I think it's peculiar that you don't see Ben Shapiro as threatening people people with shunning, with economic reprisals, with panning, that you don't see Alan Dershowitz as threatening people under color of law, or with spurious legal damages, or defamation, or censorship, or any of the other tools that the Israel Lobby use in a corporate fashion to threaten their enemies. My reading of Georg Simmel indicates that there is no such thing as political power without money, and activists like Dershowitz and Shapiro seem to be in lock step with generating the kind of bad press for people that specifically attacks their money. They attack reputation, they attack hiring, they attack ticket sales, they attack venue, they attack publication. All of that amounts to a wholesale assault on networks and money. Can't you see why I would interfere with that for reasons wholly unrelated to opinions on Judaism or Jews? Perhaps, one can take my actions here and presume that my actions are only here. That's understandable.

I believe there is a right and a wrong side of censorship, of torture, of pollution, of war, of roadblocks and checkpoints, of economic collapse. At this point in our history, it appears that if you are against global warming, that infuriates the Israel Lobby because it is courting the oil lobby. If you oppose checkpoints, that infuriates the Israel Lobby, because they are pushing airport security and the seriousness of the War against Terror. If you oppose video cameras everywhere then you must be "with the terrorists." If you oppose torture then you oppose torturing Muslims, and that's bad. I want to break up this intellectual embargo against every political opinion that seems like it is being forcibly and strenuously stalemated until the Israel issue and the World Economy issue are hashed out by curmudgeons.

Touchstone

I see Shapiro and Dershowitz as mounting defensive efforts, not offensive ones. They're defending a much-maligned place and people. Are Israel's defenders to be silenced, so that only the voices of their attackers can be heard? I don't find myself agreeing with everything they write, but just speaking generally, I don't see why they shouldn't have the right or privilege to add their thoughts to the ongoing debate. If they're actually guilty of ruining reputations, then they'd be subject to penalty under defamation laws. If you say they're guilty of this, maybe they are. I don't know. I'm not familiar with any particular cases. I sometimes read their articles and that's it. I don't usually target or defend columnists because there are so many of them and there isn't any one in particular I follow closely or care that much about. My guess would be that, considering they're both smart lawyers, they probably haven't done anything illegal.

As for intellectual embargos, in such a diverse society, there are many such embargos because there are so many who might be easily offended. You've decided to zero in on just one group you despise. Do you remember how outraged the Asians were when Jeremy Lin was the subject of cheap puns and headlines? And what do you think would happen if someone were to publish a cartoonist's image of Muhammad? What group do you think would heap opprobrium and commit acts of violence? Would the same thing happen if someone drew a cartoon of Jesus or Moses? You're pretty sure you've identified the only muzzle-applying group of intellectual thugs in society, but once again, you see only one villain. Are you a polymath, or a single-minded, one-dimensional Terminator programmed to target and destroy one tiny segment of society and completely ignore everyone else? Monomania, thy name is Schlomotion.

Schlomotion

They are smart lawyers, at least Mr. Dershowitz is. He is certainly crafty, knowledgeable, intelligent, disarming, and periodically witty. I still think he is a complete sophist and he uses that sophistry as a shield for Zionism.

Again, of course these people have the right, and nobody can really give or take from them that inalienable right, to speak. I think it's really a matter of conditioning and not of experienced threat that they take this defensive stance. I think they are both clever enough to avoid defamation lawsuits, Mr. Dershowitz from big people that he slanders by innuendo and framing, and Mr. Shapiro from anybody by being more of a tabloid commentator like Perez Hilton.

Your second paragraph posed a question, and I think the answer is that if I drew a funny picture of Muhammad, some Muslims might throw a rock at me, but if I drew a funny picture of a Jew, then Jews would try to get me fired from my job, or my publications closed down, or my spot on Arsenio Hall cancelled, or my West Palm Beach deli taken off of Zagat's, or three scathing articles by FPM linking me to Al Sharpton, Saul Alinsky, the Left, and Hitler.

Touchstone

"some Muslims might throw a rock at me" — No, they'd try to kill you and you'd have to go into hiding (assuming you had a wide readership). You purposely downplayed the severity of Muslim rage and exaggerated the reprisals of vindictive Jews. For someone who claims to be a Jew and a Muslim concurrently, you always favor the Muslim in you. Your agenda is naked. You always sound like a man obsessed. With Jews. By the way, determined Muslims would also do the things you accused Jews of doing. Muslims in Western countries are more advanced than you give them credit for. They don't limit their methods to rock-throwing.

Touchstone

"If we cannot mock memory we can never truly own memory"

Transparently self-serving nonsense. You've proven innumerable times that you have a penchant for making glib, flippant remarks, and you even admitted as much. This statement of yours is merely a way of justifying your wish to carry on regardless. It's overwrought to claim that others insist on being "sad, miserable, and accusatorily bitter" when referencing the Holocaust, but it's pretty damn obvious why one would at least take it seriously. And it's not that there isn't any humor to be generated, but context matters. I once saw a German stand-up comic mention the Holocaust and sheepishly say, "Can't we let bygones be bygones?" It was actually very funny, in a kind of defusing-the-tension sort of way. It also helped that the rest of his act consisted of him poking fun at his own stereotypical "German-ness" with lines like, "People think we Germans are obsessed with order and efficiency, but that's not true at all… Now then. Joke number one…" But when someone who keeps goading supporters of Israel mocks the Holocaust, there's nothing good-natured about it, and the result is mockery without the saving grace of humanity. There's no context imbuing your remarks with any layers of meaning or ambiguity. Your remarks are nakedly hostile and intentionally hurtful. That's how they come across. You've earned the mantle of "troll" because your efforts to provoke are jaw-droppingly blatant. That's the context of Schlomotion's posts: devoid of human warmth. All snide, all the time. It's YOUR mockery which is at issue here, and the mockery of all those that transparently seek to provoke and wound. It's not ALL gallows humor which is on trial. Don't be so quick to generalize and therefore unwittingly and self-aggrandizingly place yourself in the same company as people like that German comic who was clearly NOT trying to wound or infuriate. Context matters. Intent matters. Well-earned reputations matter.

Your m.o. is pretty clear. First you make a glib, inflammatory remark which is certain to provoke a hostile response. Then you get criticized for it. Then you respond to the criticism with an overly intellectualized, academic, specious defense which transforms reality into an abstraction. Armed with this new rectum-derived concoction (e.g. "If we cannot mock memory we can never truly own memory"), you make yourself feel vindicated. You see even your most flagrantly injurious put-downs as beyond reproach. Thus immunized against further criticism, you proceed to make even more intentionally provocative remarks and renew the cycle. And so the reputation of "troll" is born, because you've conditioned the other readers to expect an endless cascade of shameless provocations accompanied by the inevitable academic justifications which lack any power to convince. But you're much less interested in convincing anyone of your BS justifications than you are in continuing to pester, because therein lies the mischievous joy you derive from playing the troll.

It seems more fruitful to converse in a non-confontational way than to constantly poke people in the eye and arrogantly, but unsuccessfully, justify the poking. But like I said before: you're not interested in fruitful conversation.

Schlomotion

I agree with what you are seeing, because I know why you see it.

One reason is that you believe that I need to feel vindicated, therefore I use abstractions to vindicate my reasoning. I am an author. I am auctor. Auctoritas Myself, My suus, My ME originates. That alone is its own vindication. No further vindication do I ever need. Speaking to people either will or will not give me the same satisfaction that I feel when moving stones into a line or carrying water from a stream into a large bucket. I never seek vindication through abstraction. I am never justifying myself to you, though I respect you. I like olive loaf, do you? I would never defend my olive loaf, swiss and mustard sandwich to you, because I am the originator of my sandwich, and the taster of my sandwich.You may choose to not eat it, but the very making of such is my own, never to explain or vindicate. I eat a Holocaust and Amusement Park sandwich with Amish nonrepresentational austerity dressing and heavy metal pole dancer lettuce. That is me. There is no way to vindicate that and no cause to vindicate that. Humans make a reality. I make a fiercer one. That is joy.

People say "troll." It is just a shun word, a taboo designation of pariah-ness for someone who flames other people. I don't care if I am called that, but it is false. People tend to confuse happy, vicious, anonymous sadists with me. For the record, my primary black flag is that I diametrically disagree with the basic thrust of the herd that accumulates here. That is the main aspect of me in the context of this artwork. I swim upstream of this filth river, the water getting cleaner at the source. I could, I suppose just go where people agree with me more. In theory that is easy, just change the channel. I am more interested in the charge behind the cathode ray of this tube. I want ground. Root. Source. I am interested in David Horowitz' hatred and the little pieces he has broken off to power his young bucks. I want to destroy it all with words, cheer, and a more powerful sense of reality than I know he has.

Touchstone

"I diametrically disagree with the basic thrust of the herd that accumulates here"
"I swim upstream of this filth river"
"I could, I suppose just go where people agree with me more"
"I want to destroy it all"

These statements and others prove my point that you don't TRULY hold contradictory opinions, you only CLAIM to when accused of being single-mindedly antagonistic. These statements reveal that you truly are fully against, and not even partially in sync with, what you reductively scorn as "the herd" that gathers here.

Or do you "diametrically disagree" with the herd until it's pointed out that you "diametrically disagree", at which point you miraculously agree?

Do you now see how laughable your I'm-a-bundle-of-contradictions defense is? Nobody's fooled.

Touchstone

You can carry on like a nonsensical character chatting whimsically with Alice in her blissfully logic-free Wonderland, or you can attempt to convince me that

"As for me, I have no biases."

can somehow be reconciled with

"I diametrically disagree with the basic thrust of the herd that accumulates here"

Was it not the same person who posted both statements? Or do you have multiple personalities?

Clearly, you're biased against what you perceive as the "thrust" here. And not only biased, but so full of disdain that you consider the prevailing sentiments to be worthy of a lowly, dehumanized "herd".

Don't look now, but you're as thoroughly biased as anyone who has ever posted a comment on the internet.

Schlomotion

I know that a hammer has a really good face and a really good claw. I don't make a big deal about how great a hammer claw is for pulling out nails even though I know it can. This is like catching me singing the notes to Carmen and striking nails on the head with each orchestral blast. People will say "butbutbutbutbut you never say how good the claw is for pulling out nails, you only revel in banging nails in!" And I have to say, "well, sir, I rarely miss with a nail and I only have to pull one out every so often. If I rave on and on about the claw, I will soon be holding the tool arse-backwards."

Then a second complainant will say that it is really the handle that does all the work…

Touchstone

You can carry on like a nonsensical character chatting whimsically with Alice in her blissfully logic-free Wonderland, or you can attempt to convince me that

"As for me, I have no biases."

can somehow be reconciled with

"I diametrically disagree with the basic thrust of the herd that accumulates here"

Was it not the same person who posted both statements? Or do you have multiple personalities?

Clearly, you're biased against what you perceive as the "thrust" here. And not only biased, but so full of disdain that you consider the prevailing sentiments to be worthy of a lowly, dehumanized "herd".

Don't look now, but you're as thoroughly biased as anyone who has ever posted a comment on the internet.

Schlomotion

Something different happens to you as happens to me when we see contradictions. When you see contradictions, you halt. You point out the contradiction. You expect the contradiction to be reconciled as a prerequisite to moving forward or passing from one case to the next.

When I see a contradiction, I am not at stake in its solution. I keep going on while processing the contradiction in a dissociated way without halting. I find contradictions quaint, not glaring, since I think these things through always in parallel, not in linear.

But the case you presented is not a true contradiction. I have no biases against Jews as human beings or members of the franchise of Judaism, but I clearly have disagreements, even vehement ones with people who are Jews. That's not a contradiction at all, even if some self-appointed spokesman for the Jews kicks out a fancy if-then statement that makes agreement or benign disagreement with fawning and caveats a prerequisite for acting in the same world with Jews. That is a totalitarian claim of authority though, and I laugh that off.

Touchstone

"I have no biases against Jews as human beings or members of the franchise of Judaism" — You probably do believe this the very moment you type it, but most likely you promptly forget it, as your hundreds of insults suggest a different verdict.

"I find contradictions quaint, not glaring, since I think these things through always in parallel, not in linear." — Juggle all the contradictory opinions you want, but debates would be chaotic and fruitless if participants expressed views in constant contradiction with themselves. If a fruitful, coherent discussion or debate is the goal, one needs to stake out a position and argue it. In the context of debate, claiming to hold a contradictory position when backed into a corner is just a way of forfeiting the debate and admitting you have no coherent point to make.

By the way, I'm not the one giving you thumbs down and me thumbs up. I didn't think anyone would still be reading these comments.

Schlomotion

Have you ever seen Muhammad Ali backed into a corner? He stays there all day long. It was never a forfeited match, especially since he was doing much more than boxing.

Touchstone

It's a measure of your wildly excessive self-love that you liken yourself to Ali. Ali competed. Ali earned the title of champion. Ali didn't confer such honors on himself like a laughable little … pissant.

You hold no contradictory views. You harbor bigoted hatred and you live to express it. You're full of empty, transparent denials and lies. You ascribe to yourself layers of fascinatingly textured complexity which don't exist outside your own perpetually self-aggrandizing imagination. You wrongly believe that if you deconstruct the notion of bigotry you'll be spared the bigot box. You were wrong to claim that there aren't any intelligent people here. They were all smart enough to know you're full of irrational hatred and therefore someone to be avoided.

You practice guilt by association like any other bigot. You apply a double standard to Jews like any other bigot. You lump Jews together and stereotype them like any other bigot. You spew (yes, spew) hateful insults like any other bigot. You take a contrarian view reflexively like any other bigot. You disingenuously claim to hold contradictory views like any other bigot. You deny your bigotry like any other bigot. You justify your hatred by pointing to an unpleasant personal experience (providing a self-servingly one-sided view of the episode) like any other bigot. Hitler blamed a Jewish doctor for failing to cure his mother and a hatred was born. Congratulations on having much in common with the Fuhrer.

For a supercilious snot who endlessly aggrandizes himself based on what a one-of-a-kind word-painting philosopher he thinks he is, BowelMotion is really just a disappointingly all-too-familiar cliched bigot preening himself in the trappings of his purple prose and his Jew-baiting insults and his self-satisfying non sequiturs. Methinks these exchanges have run their course.

Schlomotion

It's really a shame if you don't want to talk anymore, however your most recent contributions were, I daresay, the most passionate attempts yet to place a Procrustean hard-limit on what you find unacceptable. You write convincingly, and I would agree with your opinions and analyses simply on the basis of their presentation but for the fact that I am out to destroy the standards that you uphold.

Touchstone

"I am out to destroy the standards that you uphold."

You're out to destroy a lot of things, apparently.

In your own words, what standards do I uphold?

Schlomotion

I am out to destroy the elements of this system where there is an us and them as defined by an inconsistent semi-closed set of dogmatic membership criteria such as "oppressed for centuries" or "chosen by god" or "having vast IQ owing to being raised in lower temperatures" or "possessing the soundest philosophy of life" or "having the most consistent argument on behalf of human subcategory X." I don't think you uphold those standards directly. I think you defend the upholders of those standards especially if they have proven themselves to be stalwart Jewish Nationalists.

Touchstone

"this system where there is an us and them"

It it really just a belief system, or is it reality? Or both? You seem to reject the possibility that "us and them" can be terrifyingly real sometimes (such as during a pogrom). It seems imprudent NOT to use the prism of "us and them" considering the pattern (of Jew-baiting leading to violence) illuminated by history. I'm not sure you're really fighting people who uphold certain standards as much as you're fighting history itself. Lotsa luck with that one. If history screams at today's Jews (however one defines membership in the tribe) that they'd better unify and prepare for perpetual onslaughts, how do you go about convincing those Jews that history is to be ignored? Is history lying? Is history inaccurate? Is history to be dismissed? Is your wisdom more useful than that to be gleaned from studying history? Have Jews drawn the wrong conclusions from history?

"having vast IQ owing to being raised in lower temperatures" — Huh? Never heard this one. Wouldn't this also apply to people who live in igloos?

"possessing the soundest philosophy of life" — What religious group DOESN'T believe that about itself? Such pride is hardly limited to adherents of the Jewish faith.

"having the most consistent argument on behalf of human subcategory X" — I don't follow.

"chosen by god" — We always get bashed over the head with this one, but experience tells me that most Jews don't truly believe this. Remember, millions of Jews identify as secular humanists. I identify as Jewish but I don't believe I was chosen for anything. In any case, being chosen is not a privilege, it's a burden. A believing Jew thinks he's been chosen to carry God's message and be a light unto the world by living a life of what Dennis Prager called "ethical monotheism", which entails obeying hundreds of ancient laws. To me this is an onerous burden. I decline. And yet I'm still inescapably Jewish in some sense of the term, not because I insist on clinging to this identity, but because it's my heritage and it's the way I'm defined by others, for better or worse.

"oppressed for centuries" — This is the only one I'm inclined to defend because it's based on the immutable historical record. Of course there were periods of relative stability and security for Jews (we're living in one now, despite whatever's looming), as well as regions where Jews thrived and prospered, at least for a time. But it's no exaggeration to point out that a very old pattern of anti-Jewish oppression exists; that it recently culminated in the worst of all the oppressions; and that there's no shortage of ruthless, hateful creatures who fervently wish to continue this ancient pattern. Blacks aren't necessarily whining when they point out their heritage of oppression, and neither are Jews. You bristle when minorities reference their troubled heritage, but the mere mention of it is NOT a deliberate attempt to evoke pathos or profit from it opportunistically.

Schlomotion

I have taken three days to sleep outside and sit in a cold river, to breathe fresh air and build a fire before coming back to read this. In this frame of mind, all but the bare essentials fall away. The bare essentials to me are that rivers, rocks, and sky speak but history is a lying ass. Where we can get away from people there is peace, but personally, I don't fault you for having a heritage or religion.

My comment about "human subcategory x" was just a dismissal of the criterion of consistency.

I don't consider Jews to be a minority other than a numerical minority. Diamonds are a minority. Garnets are a minority. They are nonetheless significant. Blacks a minority? Most of the world is non-white.

It's really a stalemate between anyone's grand delusions, or grand dreams. Ideally though, such dreams and ambitions are not nightmarish for themselves and other people and they don't reek of doom. This word "pogrom" to me, it means something Stalin or Hitler did, something which is thankfully a thing of the past, like lynching, things that were done before there were lots of schools.

Touchstone

You claim that pogroms are a thing of the past, consigned to the days of Hitler and Stalin, when in fact all it really takes is the will and the means. There's no shortage of will, and the means could arise easily and rapidly with the crumbling of economies. You've been lulled so effortlessly by current conditions into a false sense of the permanency of those circumstances. History shows us how easy it is to strip away the veneer of civilization, and how rapidly it can happen, and how disastrous it can be for vulnerable targets.

"The bare essentials to me are that rivers, rocks, and sky speak but history is a lying ass."

With respect to posting utter nonsense, you're on quite a roll today. It's disappointing that you suddenly think history is irrelevant just because you've spent some time with rocks. It's disappointing that you don't even realize how silly that sounds. I suppose next you'll experiment with LSD, then tell me how mind-altering it was, and how you now have a whole new perspective on life, and that I'm supposed to nod my head in agreement at the profundity of your startling newfound wisdom.

History doesn't give a damn about your communing with nature or your out of body experiences. History tells us immeasurably more immutable truth than one frustrated malcontent who spent three days in the woods clearing his hubris-filled head.

You and I will never come to much in the way of agreement for a number of reasons, not least because I have great respect for what history can teach us, while you swat it away like a fly. It's hard to believe anyone who calls himself a polymath would have such little appreciation for history. The disdain you have for history is eclipsed by my disdain for what you've scribbled here today.

Schlomotion

I will take the veracity of a weekend in nature against the veracity of Hegelian historical dialectical imperatives any day of the week. History is more serious than human beings? Ha! Are you a history teacher? This sounds like professional chauvinism. I appreciate history, but it's not personified and sentient. At least rocks, rivers, and mountains have the truth of physics and ecology behind them. History-As-Oracle is far less trustworthy than raw experience of nature. I diverted a portion of river with stones on Saturday while considering how Cyrus diverted the Euphrates. It is in fact, possible. Herodotus described the history well, but it takes a weekend in the mountains to actually involve oneself in the truth of it.

Are you a Holocaust survivor? Are you a pogrom survivor? Have you ever fended off a blow? How real is all of this fear of yours? Is your psychotropic reaction against an imaginary collective past truthful enough for you to point your finger derisively at people who use LSD? I don't use it, but you seem to be pretty sure that your endorphinal release of norepinephrine and cortisol from your amygdala's fear response pathway is more accurate than my resting rate of calm observation while sitting in ice water.

Touchstone

History versus nature? You seem to enjoy throwing two unrelated things together and pretending you've drawn a meaningful analogy. It makes logical sense to me that one can learn volumes about human behavior from studying the history of thousands of years of human activity. It doesn't make any sense to me that one truly learns anything about anything from spending time alone by the side of a river, except that one enjoys the experience (or not). Claiming you've learned more about life by piling rocks together is ludicrous and it reads like bad poetry. Once again you find yourself in the midst of trying to prove the validity of an utterly nonsensical thesis. Once again you reveal how shallow and unserious your attitude is to this world of dangerous conflicts we live in. I'm interested in understanding how the world has reached this state of affairs and where it might be heading. You're interested in rainbows and rebelliously insisting that rainbows are all the knowledge I'll ever need.

What you're really trying to do is disarm me. You hate it that the historical record does in fact reveal a clear pattern of Jews being persecuted. That pattern is a signal to Jews to hold the line and not let the state of Israel be weakened or destroyed. You're tired of hearing about the Holocaust or any other justification for Jewish concerns or for Zionism, so you claim that history is a liar and I should consult with some blades of grass if I seek an oracle. You're just trying to trip me up.

History doesn't lie. People do. People like you, such as when you tell me I've created an "imaginary collective past". That's something a Holocaust denier might say, and such people don't have noble agendas.

"Imaginary collective past". How I wish the many millions of Jews tormented and destroyed over the centuries were all just figments of imagination, rather than real flesh with real wounds. Rachel Corrie is real to you, but the multitude slaughtered by the Romans or the multitude tortured by Spanish Inquisitors or the multitude gassed by Nazis are all "imaginary". So I'm just inventing a link between these multitudes, and all the multitudes in between? I see. But of course, let's mourn for Rachel Corrie instead because "Israelis are bad people" and their heritage is "imaginary" and only their victims are real.

What's the point of continuing this? You'll never stop denying Jews have any kind of heritage at all, and you'll never stop trumpeting the heritage and plight of Palestinians with all the hypocrisy and crocodile tears you can manufacture.

Schlomotion

I did laugh. Oh boy, did I laugh, reading you say "what you're really trying to do is disarm me." I could only imagine you menacingly brandishing an inflatable catfish or some other prop.

All an irrational is is an expression that cannot be rendered as a/b because say for example, one of the components is imaginary. You are being as ostensibly irrational as I because you are doing historical animism while accusing me of doing naturalist animism. By all means, use your weapon to its fullest advantage.

Yes. When I am stacking stones in a river, I am living a moment of history and drawing inferences from it. When I am stacking cinderblocks into a wall, I am most certainly learning more about life than when I read 400 pages about the Civil War. Did I fight in the Civil War? No. Did I build something resembling a fortress? Yes. History, as marvelous as it is, is also simply a class among many classes, an element of the Humanities, and it has no hands-on quality.

For you to say "You seem to enjoy throwing two unrelated things together and pretending you've drawn a meaningful analogy" renders an indictment I could just as easily make about historians. I can say that you have stacked a few pebbles in the river of time and learned nothing.

Rainbows are a vast repository of information, yet you dismiss them. The entire refractory index of human visible light is represented therein. There is a metaphor between them and the spectrum of audible human frequencies. Perhaps that is a meaningless metaphor to you, but I call it a homology. I can easily transfer your homologies about rivers to your proclamations about history. It is a simply topological shift, not necessarily a topical one.

A Holocaust denier might say "please pass the salt" or "may I have a drink of water?" I might say the same thing. You too like to lift your superficial epidermal layers from history's villains and append them to history's heroes.

I don't think the multitudes of Jews tortured by by the Spanish are figmentary. However, the "converso threat" of "collaboration with the Mussulman," was that figmentary? I don't think so either. Somehow Spain found all of Grenada under the control of Saladin and a bunch of nominally Catholic dhimmi landlords. That was the basis for the "antisemitism" that drove Columbus to the New World.

Touchstone

You seem to be experiencing some glaring failures in cognition, so I'll try to spell things out for you.

I was speaking metaphorically when I said you're trying to disarm me. Presumably it was difficult for you to understand what I was getting at in your hubris-induced stupor.

Clearly you're trying to FIGURATIVELY disarm every single person you converse with here. If our points about Muslim radicals (and others) are like weapons we bring to this verbal battle, you counter with points of your own (i.e. specious, self-serving, distracting arguments) intended to neutralize them. Alas, you're the one shooting blanks, at least in my opinion, so it would make more sense to me if your derisive laughter was directed inwardly.

You also completely misunderstand my scoffing references to rainbows and such. I'm not diminishing the scientific study of nature. I'm diminishing your laughable assertion that one learns nothing useful from history whereas communing with nature provides the only truly valuable wisdom. To you one is to be dismissed as a "lying ass", the other lauded. To me they both teach different things. Believing that spending time with rocks and rivers will elucidate the full gamut of truths to be gleaned from history (rather than just one here or there, like diverting a river) is preposterous. I suppose you would close down all the history departments in universities and send the students to botany classes, where in your mind they'll learn the same thing.

Schlomotion

This is starting to sound a lot like Christ on the cross telling people that when they hold his body in fetters they hold nothing, that you can kill the body and not the spirit etc etc.

No one is begrudging you your Judaism, or your secular Judaism or your collection of history books, or your right to go live in a block hut next to the grave of Baruch Goldstein or whatever you want to do. As an American, I enjoy a laissez faire attitude about whatever you want to do with your life to find happiness. Where we cross your inflatable sword and my still quite sheathed, boxed, and shelved sword, is in your marketing of Israel.

The "words that work" do not work for you. At times your mind is wide open and interesting, but then we remember that you are supposed to be defending and securing the realm and suddenly all is bitterness and the ripping down of anything that does not serve the collective Jew-self. I don't expect you to concede that the Israeli glass bunker state will ever be secure or that no one will ever hate a Jew ever again. It is funny though that your hatred of the un-hive extends to rocks, trees, rivers, and rainbows.

Touchstone

"your right to go live in a block hut next to the grave of Baruch Goldstein" — Another repulsive slander. Cheap shots are your specialty. You've proven to be a shameless provocateur who will say ANYTHING to get a rise out of the Jews you hate (but feebly claim not to).

"your marketing of Israel" — I want the place to SURVIVE. I'm not executing an ad campaign for Israeli tourism.

"suddenly all is bitterness" — Yes, but you predictably fail (and it truly is an EPIC fail) to understand why. The reason is your own penchant for making glib, shallow, callous, arrogant, condescending, slanderous, inflammatory and openly prejudiced remarks and generalizations. I suppose you would characterize all the above as "wide open and interesting", and therein lies the source of our insurmountable communication problem.

"your hatred of the un-hive extends to rocks, trees, rivers, and rainbows" — A perfect example of the shamelessly inflammatory remark I accused you of. Clearly, my position is that studying or communing with nature is as beneficial as it is enjoyable. My point (which you deliberately ignore because you insist on being a vexatious git) is that communing with nature doesn't substitute for studying history.

If I sounded like I hate the natural world, it's because you obtusely missed my intention, which was to denigrate your vapid arguments, not nature itself. I'm disrespecting you, not the beloved earthworm. So sorry for the confusion.

Schlomotion

I want Israel to survive too. Even to thrive. Or persist and be developed, anyway. Countries aren't alive. I just differ over who needs to get railroaded for that to happen.

Touchstone

I don't know what to make of your ignoring most of my content (it's probably because this thread has gotten too long and rancorous), but I'll repeat the part that I hope you consider:

You build a wall between yourself and others when you make such remarks. It shouldn't come as a surprise that you receive opprobrium when you provoke others incessantly. The only surprise to me here is that you seem surprised at such a predictable outcome. You reap what you sow.

Schlomotion

Yes. I did not rebut that because I accept that as a stylistic criticism. I am not surprised at the outcome of it. It is calculated.

Touchstone

You seemed surprised when you wrote "all is bitterness" and commented on how sometimes my brain is "interesting", as if you didn't understand your own role in why I started talking like a typical defensive Jew aiming to "secure the realm".

If you DO realize you're stoking fires, then you must be trying to make an enemy of me as much as anyone else here. If that's the case, I've indulged you long enough. The callous comments you leave all over this site (like the one about Munich) serve no purpose but to offend.

Schlomotion

Perhaps, but offending serves another purpose. It cuts down on the sense of royalty associated with being on the blinding morally right side of the equation.

Offense is an integral part of Zen.

Touchstone

I'm posting my response to this at the bottom of this thread, after your silly comment about the "ideal art gallery."

Touchstone

In conclusion…

You seem to be doing an intellectual dance around a simple, inescapable fact: It's not credible to berate Jews for exaggerating threats while expecting your own grandiose ambitions to be taken seriously. I don't see how a tapdance of erudite allusions will get you out of this one. As you proceed with your grand plans, you'll do so with the uncomfortable knowledge that you're being hypocritical every time you belittle Jewish concerns about Islamic radicalism. After all, if we're supposed to believe you when you say you're going to smash all those standards, why shouldn't we believe it when we hear Muslim maniacs say they're going to destroy Israel and kill all the Jews? Nasrallah has a bigger following than you do, and he's expressed an ambition to gather all the world's Jews in Israel so he can finish us off. Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have many more millions of followers than you do, and they routinely express similar interests. Rather than convince me why those threats should be dismissed, your posts have unwittingly argued in FAVOR of taking all those maniacs seriously. And that goes for all those domestic anti-terrorism measures you hate, too. In light of your expectation that your wild ambition should be taken seriously, it follows that you too must now stop vilifying "you people" for making the USA "nearly uninhabitable". Thanks to your own plea to be taken seriously, henceforth we must all operate under the umbrella of "take every threat seriously".

Will you now stop criticizing Jews for taking jihadist threats seriously? Imagine that every jihadist out there is every bit as ambitious as you are. Surely you'd want us to take all those Schlomotions seriously! How can we know they won't make good on their threat to sack the Jewish Alexandria, so to speak? You're saying that we can't know. We can't know if you'll succeed or fail, and we can't know if they'll succeed or fail. All "hostiles" must be taken seriously. Welcome to the brave new world you've just created: EVERYBODY GETS TAKEN SERIOUSLY. NO THREAT OR AMBITION IS EVER TO BE DISMISSED. NO EXCEPTIONS.

Uh oh. You now have no reason to keep arguing against Horowitz and Spencer and the rest. You've pulled the rug out from under your own feet. All I did was pay attention and connect the dots.

————————————————————

Who should be faulted the most for upholding certain standards which amount to an "us and them" attitude? You've been admonishing the wrong crowd all along. You should be badgering Muslims for their "us and them" mentality, not Jews. It's all those exterminatory Muslim fanatics who possess the starkest "us and them" mentality of any human brain on Earth. It's quite wasteful for you to expend such energy on a crusade against a handful of people who think they're "chosen by God" (and it's only a handful within a handful, as I mentioned) when what's needed is a crusade to stop the vast multitudes who think they're "chosen by Allah to kill the people who think they're chosen by God". It's odd that you're so dedicated to obliterate what you identify as Jewish standards when it's the standards of the world's barbarian hordes (in combination with the huge numbers of Huns who espouse them) that are the most depraved, odious, indefensible and dangerous. Maybe you just find it easier to go after the Jews than the Muslims. Smaller numbers. Less risk of reprisals.

If contemptible "standards" are your targets rather than people or nations, you ought to switch the focus of your crusade.

Schlomotion

I don't live with Muslims. Not really. I live with Jews. Muslims are still this arcane foreign thing. Jews are this fairly omnipresent loud cosmopolitan thing. Muslims do not truly influence American media and culture. Jews do. So it makes no sense for me to redirect my anti-Kulturkampf from Jews to Muslims.

Your second to last paragraph is just a reworked piece of classic rhetoric "anything they say about Jews, Muslims do worse and in the billions." Islam might be stupid or cruel, or backward, but it is also far away. Even in the context of 9/11 it is pathetic, foreign, weak. In the context of the UK, it is overshadowed by the UK's collapse to the EU and to the surveillance state. As an American, I still observe that Jews are more of a thing than Muslims.

This idea that we can't take every grandiose ambition or claim seriously is exactly my point. The world is a sea of such claims. I can't allow a man to come up to me and say I "might be a terrorist" or that my camera "might be a bomb" or my bag "might contain a gun." It's not acceptable day to day discourse and interaction anymore. Unfortunately, it is all derived from this war against Muslims, so the war against Muslims, or at least its domestic manifestation in day to day American life has to go. I faced this down at least one time, but the idea was that "the history of 9/11" is not going anywhere, so I will have to go in a cage. I am not currently in a cage, so again, the history is going to have to go in the trashcan, because I am a person and I will not.

I still see that as having something in common with, and not in antithesis with Judaism, because why should people be expected to roll over into an ash heap at the behest of a checkpoint security team?

Touchstone

"Islam might be stupid or cruel, or backward, but it is also far away." — I recall it being much closer to home on September 11th, 2001. And when the Times Square Bomber was denied his goal of killing hundreds of passersby. And when the Underwear Bomber was thwarted and failed to blow up the plane. And when the Shoe Bomber failed in his mission as well. And when that maniac gunned down his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood. And when that nutjob killed random Jews in Seattle. And when that terrorist killed an El Al employee at the airport.

We live in a big world made small by technology and the murderous fanatics who intend to use it to accomplish their objectives. But even if the fanatics never reach you personally, a faraway conflict involving Muslims can easily have dramatic repercussions for you wherever you live. You forget how interconnected the world is. You speak as if it's the 18th century.

Even though you keep your head firmly in the ground, it's great that you still leave one eye open for "rhetoric" and "canned words" and probably consider yourself observant when you identify them as such.

Schlomotion

This is my point. I am not moved by 9/11. I can't make it any plainer. 9/11 is not my Year Zero. I did not redefine my life on 9/11 to be Muslim-Judeo-Security centric. I am not a lemming. Not a sheep. There brass ring in my nose being pulled around by a security cleric shouting Never Again. When someone waves an American flag with a Bald Eagle Adobe Illustrated over it and starts playing Lee Greenwood, I don't think E Pluribus Unum, I think ignorant redneck hillbilly drinking his Budweiser. Hasbaras have done good work trying to hitch the Neo-confederate bandwagon to the World Likud engine, but that is not for me. I am not into Nascar and Christian Zionism. The USA is not my Kibbutz or Trailer Park, it is my country. I didn't synchronize my goldfish brain and give up my manhood to the Department of Homeland Security in 2001. Did you? I hope not.

Schlomotion

This is my point. I am not moved by 9/11. I can't make it any plainer. 9/11 is not my Year Zero. I did not redefine my life on 9/11 to be Muslim-Judeo-Security centric. I am not a lemming. Not a sheep. There is no brass ring in my nose being pulled around by a security cleric shouting Never Again. When someone waves an American flag with a Bald Eagle Adobe Illustrated over it and starts playing Lee Greenwood, I don't think E Pluribus Unum, I think ignorant redneck hillbilly drinking his Budweiser. Hasbaras have done good work trying to hitch the Neo-confederate bandwagon to the World Likud engine, but that is not for me. I am not into Nascar and Christian Zionism. The USA is not my Kibbutz or Trailer Park, it is my country. I didn't synchronize my goldfish brain and give up my manhood to the Department of Homeland Security in 2001. Did you? I hope not.

Touchstone

What histrionics. Your grandiosity extends to your reactions to 9/11. It isn't "Year Zero", but it shouldn't be taken lightly either. Americans aren't "lemmings" if they accept that there are these things in the world called "radical Muslims" who want to do them harm. Much like Indians in Mumbai aren't fools to believe they might be attacked again by Pakistani terrorists. Much like Russians aren't lemmings if they're inclined to be vigilant about the ever-present threat from Chechen radicals. Americans are hardly the only targets of Islamic terrorist groups. People aren't brainwashed lemmings if their eyes are open to the reality that their world is plagued by a variety of ills, one of which is radical Muslims.

You're as myopic about history as you are about Islam. You're relentlessly America-centric, as if nefarious elements within your own country have concocted a story about radical Muslims just to vex you. Your commentary is as bereft of historical perspective as it is of an appreciation that the world does in fact extend beyond America's borders.

Schlomotion

Muslim terrorism is just fractional-reserve reality. One tiny attack, decades of bounced credibility checks drawn against it by the Pentagon, FEMA and the DHS. I grew up with Muslims bombing airplanes. All of a sudden in 2001 that trace problem is magnified a thousandfold and we have to cash in our republic and freedoms to pay for an endless propaganda campaign against some motley crew of swamis? Yeah you're right I am calling it a concocted story. Imagine if the Founding Fathers abandoned the Republic because of the Barbary Pirates! Now the Russians are good people and the Chechen separatists are evil? It's OK to nerve gas countries in order to maintain Russian access to natural gas pipelines and prevent more breakaway republics? Balogna.

Touchstone

Perhaps it seems like such a tiny threat because all the innumerable daily actions taken against terrorist activity go unreported. There would have been many more attacks had bin Laden been permitted to dominate Afghanistan with his band of maniacs. There would be more attacks if there weren't Western forces engaged in the various battles against radical Muslim elements. You've been lulled into believing there's no serious threat precisely because you're being sheltered from it by people you wrongly criticize.

As for having to "abandon the Republic", that's just more hyperbolic histrionics on your part. The Barbary Pirates were nothing compared to millions of fanatics with nukes and other explosive devices and modern forms of transportation and delivery systems.

And what myopia about Russians and Chechens! It's one thing to understand Chechen grievances, but you imply that it's perfectly OK for Chechen murderers to commit atrocities like they did in Beslan (remember all those innocent Russian children, oh gallant champion of the downtrodden?) or like all those bombs detonated in Moscovite subway stations. What's "evil" is your dismissal of the mass murder of innocent victims, just because you sympathize ideologically with the victimizers. What's "evil" is your practice of guilt by association. You indict all Russians for the actions of their government and military, or all Israelis for Rachel Corrie. You have no compunction about condemning whole populations. Ideology first, people second.

Schlomotion

"Perhaps it seems like such a tiny threat because all the innumerable daily actions taken against terrorist activity go unreported."

That does not pass Occam's Razor. It is not reasonable to assume that terrorism is not happening because of vast unreported actions to stop terrorism. That ranks terrorism amongst giant purple elephants that we only fail to see because the invisible and unthanked purple elephant hunters do not get press time. Reporting is not the quantifier of existentiality. Conversely, terrorism is largely a function of media coverage. Small acts of barbarism actually do occur and they are inflated to epidemic supercolossal status. In the same way, the internet enables lunatics to overemphasize the threat from Grey Aliens and Fluoride.

I haven't been lulled into not believing there is a threat. The natural and expected initial state is lull (or null). I have been moved from lull to cynicism about the terrorist threat. I have not been moved from cynicism to fear.

I don't condone Chechen attacks on innocents, but I do support their separatism, and all the hype about Chechen terrorism comes from Putin and United Russia.

Schlomotion

"Perhaps it seems like such a tiny threat because all the innumerable daily actions taken against terrorist activity go unreported."

That does not pass Occam's Razor. It is not reasonable to assume that terrorism is low because of vast unreported actions to stop terrorism. That ranks terrorism amongst giant purple elephants that we only fail to see because the invisible and unthanked purple elephant hunters do not get press time. Reporting is not the quantifier of existentiality. Conversely, terrorism is largely a function of media coverage. Small acts of barbarism actually do occur and they are inflated to epidemic supercolossal status by the media that were the desired audience. In the same way, the internet enables lunatics to overemphasize the threat from Grey Aliens and Fluoride.

I haven't been lulled into not believing there is a threat. The natural and expected initial state is lull (or null). I have been moved from lull to cynicism about the terrorist threat. I have not been moved from cynicism to fear.

I don't condone Chechen attacks on innocents, but I do support their separatism. All the hype about Chechen terrorism comes from Putin and United Russia.

Touchstone

"I don't condone Chechen attacks on innocents"

Yes, that's what you say AFTER you've established that Russia is the evil villain and the Chechens are the heroes. These are the crocodile tears you cry only after you're reminded about the heinous methods employed by groups you support, like the Chechens or the Palestinian resistance. In any case, the reason we're talking about Chechen tactics is that you diverted a discussion about the threat of global jihadism to one about who's at fault between the Russians and the Chechens. The initial point was about Chechens being yet another example of Muslim extremists who slaughter innocents as a tactic, and why an ideology like that is obviously a threat to innocents elsewhere. You felt compelled to distract the focus of the discussion. This is why I said you seek to disarm your opponents, to convince us that our verbal "weapons" (i.e. the points we make) are misdirected and that we should direct them elsewhere or abandon them altogether.

Schlomotion

But, Russia is the evil villain and the Chechens are the heroes.

Touchstone

Not when they shred innocent bodies to pieces and murder children. As for dodging the point about Chechen tactics and their similarity to those used by other radical Muslims (and the wider implications of such behavior), nicely done.

Schlomotion

That is the tragedy of it. The Chechens are the heroes and they sank to the level of villains. Then the Russians came in as the heroes by acting as bigger villains. The lesson there was that might makes right, and nerve gas entitles you to rule. So sad.

Touchstone

"This idea that we can't take every grandiose ambition or claim seriously is exactly my point. The world is a sea of such claims."

I see. So it's not a matter of "let's take every threat equally seriously", it's more a case of "let's dismiss every threat". Or just the Muslim threats? After considering the matter, I think I'll take threats from a "sea" of determined jihadists more seriously than the threats from lone wolves on the internet, crying in the wilderness about how extraordinary they are.

You do realize we must have a system of triage in place to rank the relative seriousness of the threats swimming in the "sea". It seems more judicious to me to regard a violent fanatic who is a member of an ancient, imperialistic, worldwide cult (especially if the fanatic runs a country or a well-funded terrorist group) as posing a more dangerous and credible threat than some guy with an internet connection.

Like you said, "we can't take every grandiose ambition or claim seriously". How true. We must sort the grandiose claims into at least two piles, the credible and the not-so-credible. Given that your ambitions would be placed in the latter pile, that doesn't mean the ambitions of various jihadists deserve the same treatment.

Schlomotion

I agree with all of this which is why I place the "threat from Muslims" far below the threat from oligarchical collectivists, urban mismanagement, pollution, roadway accidents, and substandard Chinese kitchen utensils. All of these and obesity threaten Americans far more than some CIA coached adolescent with firecrackers in his underpants.

Touchstone

"It is a curse as such and it is also a curse cheaply used by Jews at every turn. I wager Jews abuse the memory of the Holocaust more often than non-Jews, especially by getting all puffed up and angry when a check written against it bounces."

Spitting on solitary, indefatigable heroes like Wiesenthal; equating a Jewish newspaper columnist with exterminatory Nazi stormtroopers; glibly and relentlessly poking Jews in the eye in a million different ways, like making tasteless, tactless puns … that's why people get "all puffed up and angry". And it's a hysterical overstatement to accuse Jews of "cheaply" using the Holocaust "at every turn". Just because you're tired of hearing about something doesn't mean it's lost its relevance.

You exaggerate and generalize about Jews as befits a bigot, while disingenuously rejecting that characterization. You claim to be a painter of words using this website as your gallery, but it's most assuredly the most indulgent kind of abstract art whose worth and meaning are in the eyes of its creator alone. It's the kind of art that laughs at people who actually paid for a ticket to the exhibit. The patrons have been had.

Schlomotion

In an ideal art gallery, the doors would grow great teeth and clamp shut and munch the patrons to death.

Touchstone

(continued from above, re: your comment about offending Jews with a sense of royalty)

A man who calls himself a polymath, who refers to himself as "extravagantly gifted", who arrogantly calls history a "lying ass", who condescends to every Jew he talks to, who grandiosely believes he's going to hit the reset button with Israel — this is not a man with the credibility to impugn anyone with a "sense of royalty". A man who has the hubris to put himself on the same level as Alexander, without yet proving himself "Great", has about as well-developed a sense of personal royalty as one can possess.

But this is all just another BS claim on your part anyway. You're just offering a phony justification for your endless malice. For example, it's not a sense of "royalty" or being "blindingly morally right" that compelled a few Jews to request the briefest of mentions at the Olympics, yet you still believed you were justified in causing offense (as I described in that thread). You offend GRATUITOUSLY, out of spite and malice, not out of such an admirable reason as deflating an undeserved sense of royalty. You offend and offend and offend, with no purpose higher than provoking as much outrage as you can using as much spite as you can muster.

By the way, thanks for tacitly admitting that your intention is indeed to make an enemy of me. That's further proof (though no more is needed) that your claims of sympathy for the Zionist cause amount to yet another chunk of "false information", and further proof that you are indeed motivated by spite, bereft of any nobler purpose.

Schlomotion

Where did you get the idea that you are "every Jew I talk to?" I didn't say you were every Jew I talk to. I said you are one of the most intelligent commenters on the site, not EveryJew. I don't condescend when I believe sincerity is in play. I only do it against gambits, in this case either sophistical refutations, or nationalistic chauvinism. Sometimes talking to you is like talking to Richard Landes. He argues the same way.

The tu quoque is still invalid. Otherwise my counter (equally invalid) is how can you accuse me of spite while defending a nation that expands by building spite houses?

I do, however hold these truths to be self evident: Christmas does not have to be a Celebration of Jesus and the Olympics does not have to be a celebration or memorialization of Black September. What that invokes in me is not spite but an abject refusal to countenance the appropriation of the higher and more universal event and its reduction to a degenerate Passion Play of suffering and accusation.

Jim_C

LOL!!!

Zionista

I bet they'll try hijacking planes and fly them into buildings…………………………………..oh wait!

Asher

How Ironic that Jews who support Alinsky's tactics and help the Nazi machine would themselves be targeted if the same people were in total control…how utterly wrong minded to support this movement.

abutom1128

IT IS EASY TO INFILTRATE A RELIGION THAT TEACHES LOVE THY NEIGHBOR AS THYSELF. THE FAITHFUL ARE EASY TO DUPE. TWO REGIONS OF THE WORLD OBAMA HATES. THE SOUTHLAND AND ISRAEL.
IF YOU CAN'T SEE THAT THEN YOU MISSED THE SECOND GIVE AWAY OF POLAND, CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND THE UKRAINE TO THE RUSSIANS ALONG WITH BRITISH SUBMARINE NUKE SERIAL NUMBERS.
HOW ABOUT TELLING IRAN THE ISRAELIS HAD AN AIRFIELD IN AZERBAIJAN? http://WWW.MEDIACRAPMATTERS.UShttp://WWW.SPIRITOFAMERICAPARTYRADIOSHOW.COM

Ronald Johnston

The Jewish people have contributed a large percentage of the productive people of the last several centuries which should make them the smartest people in this world. However, they must not have much walking around sense because they do not recognize the fox in the hen house!!!! osama obama!!!!

Jim_C

I agree, but I chalk it up to the notion that it is only the most productive, educated, and good-looking Jewish people who support Obama. Guys like Gene Simmons and Jon Lovitz (i.e.,ugly third tier-talent meatheads) are square in the camp of those who don't.